Touché by Disney Research brings touch control to everyday things

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/05/touche-brings-touch-controls-t.html

by jcfrei • 14 years ago

178 49 14 years ago

agumonkey• 14 years ago

This gonna fuel so many designers brainstorm. It seems to sit at the right level of abstraction.

lukifer• 14 years ago

This 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.)

Drbble2• 14 years ago

Like Gmail Tap?

hsshah• 14 years ago

Indeed. Pair this with Google's Project Glass and you can avoid the awkward (in public) voice commands.

zf1234• 14 years ago

And then combine with a motion capture system for your hands to be able to manipulate virtual 3d objects that give haptic feedback.

harrisonp2• 14 years 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.

In all seriousness this is freaking awesome tech. Will definitely be huge, unless they fuck up the licensing or patent it to death.

cleverjake2• 14 years ago

elbows on the table.

jasonlotito2• 14 years 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.

harrisonp2• 14 years ago

That 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!

eevilspock• 14 years ago

It's a new cereal called Clockwork Orange Berries.

evincarofautumn• 14 years ago

Sounds right horrorshow.

vasco• 14 years ago

There'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• 14 years ago

I 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.

Natsu• 14 years ago

> A sense of touch may be all that is needed to reduce phantom limb pain, among other things.

Actually, I remember hearing that a simple mirror can do that.

famousactress• 14 years ago

Totally! 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.

babebridou2• 14 years ago

Of 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.

heyitsnick• 14 years ago

The jarring switch from "show amazing new tech with countless possibilities" to "you can train your child how to eat cereal!" made me question whether the whole video was really a clever parody.

benatkin• 14 years ago

Worst pun ever.

babebridou2• 14 years ago

It 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.

jQueryIsAwesome2• 14 years ago

Disney just won a lot of respect by me (and probably by millions of others); the awesomeness of this is staggering.

cleverjake2• 14 years ago

By funding a university research department?

jQueryIsAwesome2• 14 years ago

Yeah, and many more: http://www.disneyresearch.com/labs/index.htm

noonespecial• 14 years ago

This 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

samstave3• 14 years ago

I'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.

mhb2• 14 years ago

Is 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?

samstave3• 14 years ago

Drunks 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.

learc83• 14 years ago

It's not really a big problem in the grand scheme of things. If you follow the 4 safe behaviors(google it if necessary) it's pretty much impossible to have an accidental discharge.

But mistakes happen (and idiots happen), and occasionally someone has an accidental discharge while handling or cleaning.

I think where this would really shine is for user recognition/unlock as mentioned by a previous poster. There have already been attempts at user recognition, but those relied on magnetic rings or RFID chips.

mark_integerdsv• 14 years ago

Gun owner loses concentration for a second. Safe is left unlocked. Child gains access to firearm. Child mimics television and pulls the trigger. Childs hands are too small/weak, firearm is heavy, grip on firearm is frail, gun does not fire.

personlurking2• 14 years ago

or how about guns that won't fire because you aren't the registered owner (or approved on 'firing list' of some sort, in the case of, let's say, a wife that's home alone when a burglar comes).

Brings a whole new meaning to hacking, also.

samstave3• 14 years ago

Bu this doesn't provide the ability to ID, just the ability to sense particular holds.

raphman• 14 years ago

There has been a lot research on grasp detection and interpretation over the last 10 years. Touché is just a new sensing technique, not a new interaction paradigm.

For example, Raymond Veldhuis has been working on smart gun grips that identify their owner since 2003: http://www.sas.el.utwente.nl/open/people/Raymond%20Veldhuis

mikeburrelljr• 14 years ago

Mysterious how HN submissions get picked up... I submitted this yesterday via VentureBeat: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3931173

alagappanr• 14 years ago

The title makes the difference. :)

personlurking2• 14 years ago

I suppose this puts the tech in Minority Report to shame. Now I'm thinking Google Goggles/Glasses + Touché.

dools• 14 years ago

This 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/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...

nextstep• 14 years ago

Good! Finally we'll have the technology to train children to properly eat cereal!

jachwe• 14 years ago

that'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• 14 years ago

Does 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• 14 years ago

This site provides a nice, simple overview: http://www.analog.com/library/analogDialogue/archives/40-10/...

sravfeyn• 14 years ago

What about the feasibility, commercially?

Touché by Disney Research brings touch control to everyday things

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