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Over the past few years, the world has fallen in love with multitouch displays. But today's consumer interfaces have some drawbacks: touch screens such as those on the iPhone and Plastic Logic's upcoming e-reader only work with a finger, not a stylus or even a gloved hand. Other displays, such as Microsoft's Surface and Perceptive Pixel's wall-sized screens, are rigid, relatively expensive, and currently fairly bulky.

New research from New York University, however, promises to make multitouch interfaces that are cheap and flexible and can be used by fingers and objects alike. The technology, called Inexpensive Multi-Touch Pressure Acquisition Devices (IMPAD), can be made paper thin, can easily scale down to fit on small portable devices, or can scale up to cover an entire table or wall. The researchers will present IMPAD next week at the Computer Human Interaction conference in Boston.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22358/?a=f