Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Multi-Touch Interaction

Back in September of '06 I completed a class project on emerging interaction techniques. In it I covered Mutli-Touch Interaction Research. Recently I discovered a group of individuals who are as interested in FTIR as I am. FTIR or Frustrated Total Internal Reflection, is a fairly simple technology best described by this image.When used in correlation with a modified webcam and the appropriate software one can create a multi-touch interface for a fairly inexpensive amount of money. The NUI group is a collection of individuals helping each other to create these devices. I decided I would embark on this endeavor as well in order to work on my programming skills and simply because this technology has a lot of potential. I will be marking my progress along the way as soon as I get some of my initial parts. Some amazing things have already been accomplished with this technology, many are familiar with the iPhone and Microsoft's new table which follow a similar technology, and I would like to make some discoveries of my own in this field.

Here is a video of Jeff Han demoing the Multi-touch interface created at NYU:

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