AltDel wrote:hoffman2k wrote:
We've been seeing that multitouch screen movie all summer.
Those people are pretty much done with their research.
It's just a matter of making a marketable product.
I guess you're talking about Jeff Han's FTIR multitouch technology. I had the chance to try it out by myself in Paris during the NIME conference in june. Although It's really impressive, I sincerely doubt that it will become a 'marketable product' anytime soon. The fact is that the sensing system requires an expensive infrared camera to track the fingers as well as a powerful cpu to process the camera's video signal and to extract the finger locations, not to mention the projector for the visual feedback. I'm not a technology expert, but it seems that there is no way to embed the whole multitouch system into a portable product such as the lemur. As for the price, even though the panel itself is quite unexpensive, I bet the whole system cost over 10k$. To end with, the most annoying thing with the FTIR is that it works fine only in a dark environment. I can even testify that during the demo, the system crashed because someone took a picture with a flash. To summarize, the FTIR technology is amazing when it comes to demoing the great power of multitouch interaction but it's still and
it'll remain to be a research prototype and unfortunately, I don't believe we, average consumers, will have a controller or any other product relying on this technology in the future.
thanks for this,
I've been following the Jeff Han stuff for a while and it's those little details that give us the full picture.
Especially the bit about flash disruption.
Although I wouldn't say that an Infra-red camera and a fast processor is a particular block. That infra red camera he uses looks very similar to
this one which costs all of £39.99 (infra red cameras quite popular in security apps)
Also I certainly have a small stack of fast processors just sitting idle (old DAW machines 2.6ghz p4, 2.0ghz p4, etc), so that would be no cost to me.
I can't imagine that the sheet of perspex costs much.
That said, the light sensitivity is the deal breaker, though it will be interesting to see how this is addressed. Also note that he isn't the only one working in this field - but the interest he has received will surely help finance other teams.
