Touch Screen Gadget

Google previews a touch of Adroids

Posted by admin | Category: Software, Trend Watch & News

Google demonstrated some new tricks of its Android mobile phone software, including an elaborate use of Google Maps Street View and a touch-screen interface with abilities known for their presence on Apple’s iPhone.

Steve Horowitz, Android’s engineering director, used flicking gestures to sweep from the phone’s home screen to another during a speech here Wednesday at the Google I/O conference. More unusual, though was a demonstration of how the phone’s internal compass and accelerometer can enliven Street View.

After calling up a view of San Francisco using a Web browser, Horowitz turned around, and the Street View screen panned left or right accordingly, reflecting his orientation.

Also new were demonstrations of a central notification service that can display new e-mail, missed phone calls, and calendar appointments; the ability to unlock the phone using a specific connect-the-dots swipe across the screen; an option to put browser or contact list shortcuts on the Android desktop; and a version of Pac-Man from Namco. Read the rest of this entry »

Cheap open-source,DIY Multitouch Display

Posted by admin | Category: Multi Touch, Table and Floor, Trend Watch & News

Engineers are building inexpensive, tabletop, touch-screen displays and sharing the instructions online.

The iPhone popularized the idea of multitouch displays, and just last month, Microsoft brought the concept to a larger screen by releasing Surface, a multitouch table with a hefty $10,000 price tag. But now engineers at Eyebeam, an art and technology center based in New York, have created a scaled-down open-source version of Surface, called Cubit. By sharing the Cubit’s hardware schematics and software source code, the engineers are significantly reducing the cost of owning a multitouch table. But they’re also fostering innovation by giving engineers an open platform on which to develop novel multitouch applications–something that they’ve previously lacked.

Addie Wagenknecht, a fellow at Eyebeam, designed Cubit in an attempt to "demystify multitouch." She and her collaborator Stefan Hechenberger "wanted to prove that anyone could build [a multitouch table] if they had a few simple things," she says. In addition to making Cubit software available online, Wagenknecht is selling various do-it-yourself kits that include parts and instructions, aimed at people with a range of engineering skills. Putting together a personal multitouch table could cost anywhere from $500 to $1,000, depending on the type of hardware used, Wagenknecht says.

Multitouch displays are not new technology; in fact, they’ve been built in research labs for decades. Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs created an iconic multitouch table called DiamondTouch; more recently, Jeff Han, founder of Perceptive Pixel, based in New York, developed wall-sized multitouch screens that he sells to corporations and major government agencies. But because of the falling costs of many touch-screen components, such as infrared light sources and small cameras and projectors, it’s now becoming feasible for people without access to a lab or venture-capital money to make their own multitouch displays.

Microsoft’s Surface has an image projector, infrared-light emitters, and five cameras nestled in its base. According to Kyle Warnick, a Microsoft marketing manager, both the projector and the infrared emitter shine onto the tabletop from underneath. When an object such as a finger or a cell phone is in contact with the surface, it reflects the infrared light in a characteristic way, and the reflection is picked up by the cameras below. Currently, Microsoft has no plans to open the hardware or software of the system to developers.

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Give your computer the finger: Touch Screen evolution

Posted by admin | Category: Trend Watch & News

“Good summary of today’s touch-screen technologies on Computerworld — the obvious Apple iPhone and Microsoft Surface, plus projected touch screens (nothing for users to break), handheld devices that you control from the back (so your fingers don’t obscure the screen), and of course giant multitouch walls a la Minority Report. Anyone got $100K?”

The WIMP human-computer interface may have an uninspiring name, but Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointing devices have dominated computing for some 15 years. The keyboard, mouse and display screen have served users extraordinarily well.

But now the hegemony of WIMP may be coming to an end, say developers of technologies based on human touch and gesture. For evidence, look no further than Apple’s one-year-old iPhone. From a human-interface point of view, the combined display and input capabilities of the iPhone’s screen, which can be manipulated by multiple fingers in a variety of intuitive touches and gestures, is nothing short of revolutionary, researchers say. Read the rest of this entry »

Multitouch a new user interface emerging and future-proof ready

Posted by admin | Category: Trend Watch & News

This interface is generally called “multitouch,” and it involves using one or more fingers on a screen or touchpad to perform special gestures that manipulate lists or objects on a screen — without moving a mouse, pressing buttons, turning scroll wheels or striking keys.

Apple didn’t invent the multitouch concept. Academic and commercial researchers, and small, obscure companies, have been working on it for years. Apple is adapting the concept, adding its own ideas and popularizing it — just as it did in the 1980s with the mouse and the graphical user interface, which had also been invented elsewhere.

Rival companies are scrambling to add multitouch features to laptops and other digital gadgets. Synaptics, a leading supplier of touchpads for laptop makers who compete with Apple, has announced that shortly it will incorporate several multitouch features into its touchpads. Microsoft is producing a coffee-table-size computer called the Surface, meant for hotels, casinos and retail stores, that uses multitouch finger gestures to move around digital objects such as photos, play games and browse through product options. Hewlett-Packard developed a prototype of a similar multitouch coffee-table computer for home use.

And, in the back rooms of this month’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, various cellphone makers, seeking to emulate the iPhone, were showing off their own unannounced efforts at multitouch. One prominent cellphone maker, Taiwan-based HTC, has already built a phone, called the Touch, which slaps a rudimentary multitouch interface on Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system.

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