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Touché by Disney Research brings touch control to everyday things
- agumonkey 15y agoThis gonna fuel so many designers brainstorm. It seems to sit at the right level of abstraction.
- lukifer 15y agoThis needs to leap into the marketplace as soon as possible. The music player concept is brilliant, and that's only the tip of the iceberg. I wonder about the potential of a screen-less touch vocabulary, such that you could type a text message without taking the phone out of your pocket. (Siri is nice and all, but it requires the user to yield control to the Cloud and pray that it responds accurately.)
- harrisonp 15y agoWhat the hell is that part about kids and breakfast?! "Could be used to monitor and train kinds to use the right implements to eat breakfast". That is just messed up. In all seriousness this is freaking awesome tech. Will definitely be huge, unless they fuck up the licensing or patent it to death.
- cleverjake 15y agoelbows on the table.
- jasonlotito 15y ago> What the hell is that part about kids and breakfast?! "Could be used to monitor and train kinds to use the right implements to eat breakfast". That is just messed up. Messed up? You're just looking at what it's doing, not how it can be applied. The ability to monitor a child with special needs with this sort of application is pretty amazing. Suddenly, this information can be transmitted and used to assist with therapy. Knowing how often a child uses a spoon/fork rather than his hands due to real data rather than parents recalling is powerful. It also provides powerful feedback. A system setup to remind them child if they stop using their fork/spoon by showing a picture to remind them. This is already used in training. Unfortunately, it can't be automated. Tools like this would allow for that, and the potential is staggering. We are clearly years away, but this has the great potential to really help people.
- harrisonp 15y agoThat is a really great point! I was really only appalled by the specific application of audio feedback used in the demo. And as such I blatantly discarded the whole idea of feedback systems. But when I think about it, that area is huge. I really want one of those sensor plates with an arduino interface!
- jasonlotito 15y ago> And as such I blatantly discarded the whole idea of feedback systems. That happens far too often. You have to disconnect yourself from only looking at one element though. Generally, you have an interaction taking place in the form of Event > Action. Something occurs, and then something happens. In this case, the method of eating is the event. The sound happens to be the action. However, you can always replace the Action with anything else (you can also replace the event with anything else. Basically, this is how you should approach demos. Not as the end, but as the possibilities.
- vasco 15y agoThere's also more important applications for this, for example detecting common postures and grips on fallen asleep drivers or knives that know when their not being handled properly. Additionally a world of possibilities opens up for the blind and disabled if you can inform them of objects they are touching in a room. I find these applications (and surely many more I am not enumerating) much more appealing then controlling a phone, but alas, that's what sells. Lets hope the eye-candy stuff propels the technology so that the really useful stuff can be built at a lower price.
- aperrien 15y agoI think it will be a wonderful boon for people with artificial limbs. A sense of touch may be all that is needed to reduce phantom limb pain, among other things.
- famousactress 15y agoTotally! I actually found it really surprising how boring the potential usage examples in the video were compared to what's possible with some of these ideas.
- babebridou 15y agoOf course people are thinking about games right now. The first implementation I thought of was to reproduce the "hand seal/hand wave" spellcasting in traditional fantasy lore - and thus introduce a new genre of fighting video games: sorcery duels, also known as "Certamen" among Ars Magica fans.
- benatkin 15y agoWorst pun ever.
- babebridou 15y agoIt irks me whenever a company takes a common word in a language and turns it into a name or a brand. It feels like the language is being pillaged.
- jQueryIsAwesome 15y agoDisney just won a lot of respect by me (and probably by millions of others); the awesomeness of this is staggering.
- cleverjake 15y agoBy funding a university research department?
- jQueryIsAwesome 15y agoYeah, and many more: http://www.disneyresearch.com/labs/index.htm http://www.disneyresearch.com/labs/index.htm
- noonespecial 15y agoThis seems like an important step towards the fabled "Computronium"(1) allowing our environments to compute. Heavy handed regulators should pay very close attention to the consequences of monopolies granted around these ideas. One misstep allowing the patenting of "controlling stuff with touch" instead of allowing only the much more restrictive specific methods of detecting that touch could prune an entire branch off our technological development tree for decades to come. (1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computronium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computronium
- samstave 15y agoI'd love to see this applied to guns where you have to make a much more intentioned grip for the safety to be disabled. a gun that senses it is being held in a weird way will not fire. I think the first application will be on a mouse. A mouse that has multi-dimensional touch features would be great. This will also make creating an interface to control things like the whole house very easy. Basically enabling complex control of a full building's BMS easily.
- mhb 15y agoIs that a big problem? Why don't the gun owners who perceive that as a problem use the safety or buy a gun with greater trigger pressure? If they don't do those things, why would they want to pay to add this feature?
- samstave 15y agoDrunks cleaning their gun, kids, poor training. All factors in fatal shootings. I am not saying it will solve all this - but if this can be applied, it may easily reduce it.
- anamax 15y ago> but if this can be applied, it may easily reduce it. Or, it can result in more dead people. Guns that don't go off when the trigger is pulled get people killed. FWIW, "cleaning their gun" is usually cop for "the family doesn't need the stigma of a suicide ane needs the insurance money if any". There's also some evidence that a lot of the "kid found a gun" are successful murders (by parents) or, at best, depraved indifference. The families that have them are usually "interesting".
- doktrin 15y agoCan you site some sources, please?
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- mikeburrelljr 15y agoMysterious how HN submissions get picked up... I submitted this yesterday via VentureBeat: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3931173 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3931173
- alagappanr 15y agoThe title makes the difference. :)
- personlurking 15y agoI suppose this puts the tech in Minority Report to shame. Now I'm thinking Google Goggles/Glasses + Touché.
- dools 15y agoThis reminds me of this awesome rant on the future of interaction design where the author compares the "picture under glass" model of traditional touch interfaces with the amount of interactivity we have with a sandwich: http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/ http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...
- nextstep 15y agoGood! Finally we'll have the technology to train children to properly eat cereal!
- jachwe 15y agothat's awesome. in this application it would be hard though to sense the position of these gestures i.e. where in the liquid you touched. but combined with other sensing technologie (like optical or traditional capacitive) that would be a HIT.
- tocomment 15y agoDoes anyone know how this works in detail? Also I never understand capacative sensing. Does the human have to be grounded for it to work? Why not?
- HyprMusic 15y agoThis site provides a nice, simple overview: http://www.analog.com/library/analogDialogue/archives/40-10/cap_sensors.html http://www.analog.com/library/analogDialogue/archives/40-10/...
- sravfeyn 15y agoWhat about the feasibility, commercially?