| Advanced GUI |
| Multi-Touch Screens |
They call the technology FTIR (frustrated total internal reflection) a technique well known in the biometrics community for fingerprint image acquisition. The system uses a rear-projection display with a video camera on the back-side of the surface to detect where fingers touch the display.
Amazing Video Demo of this
Detecting multiple finger touches on a rear-projection surface.
Video with Raw Camera output overlayed on Surface.
Apple has patented some these interactions such as the pinch movement for zooming, shown in this video.
Patent Application 20060026536 Steve Hotelling Apple Computers, February 2, 2006 Gestures for touch sensitive input devices
Mitsubishi, MERL DiamondTouch table is anther similar screen based on almost the same technology.
MERL DiamondTouch in action
From Slashdot:
This morning I saw a
video demonstration
of the most interesting input technology I've seen for a long time.
This is a touch-screen that accepts inputs from multiple (I saw at
least 8) points at once. It seems very responsive, the display is large
and of decent resolution, and they actually wrote software to take
advantage of it.
It appears to be entirely research
Multi-Touch Sensing through LED Matrix Displays
Two scalable techniques for enabling ordinary LED matrices to simultaneously act as multi-touch input devices. In 1977, Forrest M. Mims reminds us in one of his "Engineer's Notebooks" that LEDs can also be used as photodiodes...