With a capacitive device, it's possible to detect things like fingers some distance away from the surface, but the signal is so noisy that you get a lot of fals

With a capacitive device, it's possible to detect things like fingers some distance away from the surface, but the signal is so noisy that you get a lot of false positives. The endpoint of all this stuff seems to be the Minority Report UI (http://www.ted.com/talks/john_underkoffler_drive_3d_data_with_a_gesture.html http://www.ted.com/talks/john_underkoffler_drive_3d_data_wit...) or Kinect, where the computer is detecting what you're doing with your body in a holistic way; it can infer intent, rather than measuring specific points of data without knowledge of where they came from. Of course, that requires bigger and more expensive sensors than you're likely to find in a $499 device today.