| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
A Touch Creepy: Doorknobs And Couches Are Watching You
It looks like Disney Research is working toward making cutlery and furniture servants, a la "Beauty and the Beast," a reality.
A team of engineers from the U.S. and Japan, including two engineers from Disney Research in Pittsburgh, has created an electrode that reads the electrical signals the human body gives off, to recognize a range of things people do. Embedded in a device, the electrode knows the difference between a two- and a three-finger pinch. In a tabletop, it recognizes elbows on the table. Worn as a wristband, it knows when its wearer is clasping his hands or covering his ears. The technology could turn anything into a touch-, gesture- and posture-sensitive device, from cellphones to couches to people's bodies. The research team members will present their work May 7 at the Association for Computing Machinery's human-computer interaction conference, where they've already won a best paper award.
Touch screens in devices today recognize the electrical signals the body gives off at one frequency. So they recognize two states: "Touch!" or "No touch." The new technology, which researchers dubbed Touché, recognizes a range of frequencies, allowing Touché to recognize a range of states. So the system can recognize a variety gestures, including "two-finger pinch," "three-finger pinch," "one elbow," "two elbows" and "all fingers touching like a plotting madman."
Touché's sensing electrode is small, inexpensive and doesn't use a lot of power, Touché's creators wrote in their paper. So manufacturers could embed it in a variety of devices. In their experiments, the researchers put the electrode in a doorknob, a tabletop, a piece of plastic shaped like a cellphone, wristbands people can wear and the bottom of a tank holding water. They demonstrated that in each of these objects, the electrode sent the data it gathered to a computer, via Bluetooth. The computer then correctly recognized all of the gestures mentioned above and more, including the dip of a fingertip in the water in the tank.
