Give your computer the finger: Touch-screen tech is coming of age

By Gary Anthes

Computerworld |

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Touch anywhere

Although they have not gotten much traction in the marketplace yet, advanced touch technologies from IBM may point a way to the future. In its Everywhere Displays Project, IBM mounts projectors in one or more parts of an ordinary room and projects images of "touch screens" onto ordinary surfaces, such as tables, walls or the floor.

Video cameras capture images of users touching various parts of the surfaces and send that information for interpretation by a computer. The "touch screens" contain no electronics -- indeed no computer parts at all -- so they can be easily moved and reconfigured.

A diagram of IBM's Everywhere Displays projection system

A variation on that concept has been deployed by a wine store in Germany, says Claudio Pinhanez at IBM Research. The METRO Future Store in Rheinberg has a kiosk through which customers can get information about the wines the store stocks. But the store's inventory was so vast customers often had trouble finding the particular wine they wanted on the shelf. They often ended up buying a low-margin wine in a nearby bin of sales specials, Pinhanez says.

But now the kiosk contains a "show me" button which, when pressed, shines a spotlight on the floor in front of the chosen item. The spotlighted area is not yet an input device as described above, but it easily could be, Pinhanez says.

A German store shines a spotlight on the floor in front of customers' wine selections.

IBM is also working on a prototype system for grocery stores that might, for example, illuminate a circle on the floor that asks, "Do you want to take the first steps toward more fiber in your diet?" If the customer touches "yes" with his foot, the system projects footsteps to the appropriate products -- high-fiber cereal, say. "Then you could make the cereal box itself interactive," Pinhanez says. "You touch it, and the system would project information about that box on a panel above the shelf."

Asked if interactive cereal boxes might be a solution in search of a problem, Pinhanez says, "The point is, with projection and camera technology you can transform any everyday object into a touch screen." He says alternatives that are often discussed -- a store system talks to customers through their PDAs, for example -- are hard to implement because of a lack of standards for the devices.

Getting real

Tufts University computer science professor Robert Jacob has developed a framework that unites such disparate technologies as multi-touch screens and systems that can read emotions from the faces of users. He says such "reality-based interaction" is based on these four concepts:

Naïve physics. It's common sense that tells people that an apple that comes off a tree will fall to the ground, even if they have forgotten Newton's laws. The Apple iPhone helps user intuition by simulating gravity (as when the screen switches from portrait to landscape mode as the user rotates the device) and inertia (e.g., when flicking through the contacts list, a fast flick will keep the contacts scrolling after the user's finger has been removed, as if the list had mass).
Body awareness and skills. It's the ability -- learned very early in life -- to coordinate one's hands, eyes and senses independent of environment. "Emerging interfaces support an increasingly rich set of input techniques based on these skills, including two-handed and whole body interaction," Jacob says.
Environmental awareness and skills. Humans naturally take actions in the context of objects in the environment. Emerging human-computer interaction styles -- such as virtual reality -- do the same. For example, "context aware" or sensing systems may compute a user's location and take actions based on that.
Social awareness and skills. People are aware of the presence of others and interact with them in various ways. Similarly, emerging technologies such as the Mitsubishi DiamondTouch Table facilitates collaboration via a touch display that allows users to maintain eye contact while interacting with the display simultaneously.

Says Jacob, "All of these new interaction styles draw strength by building on users' pre-existing knowledge of the everyday, non-digital world to a much greater extent than before."

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