Random Accesses

Now that more and more smart phones and MP3 players have touch-screen interfaces, people have grown accustomed to interacting with gadgets using only taps and swipes of their fingers. But on the 11th floor of a downtown Manhattan building, New York University researchers Ilya Rosenberg and Ken Perlin are developing an interface that goes even further. It's a thin pad that responds precisely to pressure from not only a finger but a range of objects, such as a foot, a stylus, or a drumstick. And it can sense multiple inputs at once.

The idea for the pad occurred to Rosenberg, a graduate student at NYU, a few years ago when he was working with a conductive polymer called force-­sensing resistor ink, which is often used in electronic music keyboards. When pressure is applied to the ink, its molecules reorient themselves in a way that alters its electrical resistance, which is easy to measure. Rosenberg originally used the ink to create sensors that could be embedded under tennis­-court boundaries to automate line calls, but he wondered if it might be the basis of a good multi­touch interface for computers.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23169/?a=f

From Apple's iPhone to Microsoft's Surface, multi-touch user interfaces are becoming all the rage. The only trouble is that our fingers are both a tool and a hindrance; whatever we're interacting with on the display is momentarily blocked by our finger and our hands.

Microsoft, Mitsubishi, and the University of Toronto are working on a solution, and it's called LucidTouch. Ars spoke with Daniel Wigdor, one of the researchers at the Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL), to get the inside scoop on what LucidTouch is, what problems the team has run into along the way, and what's coming in the future.

LucidTouch is currently the name for a prototype device that allows users to interact with an 800x480 pixel screen without having to touch the front surface. Instead, users can choose to manipulate objects by touching a sensor pad on the back of the device; this allows users to resize images and text, as well as navigate around any graphical user interface without their hands getting in the way of the display.

Source: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070905-microsofts-lucidtouch-a-multi-touch-display-with-pseudo-transparency.html