I am sure everyone of you are using different electronic gadgets and hence well aware of touch screens and their usefulness in our daily life. But hold on i am sure u haven’t yet experienced what we all saw in the new Bond movie “Quantum of Solace” where the MI16 guys are playing around with the different shiny and fancy screens in their office using the movement of their hands in the air . Don’t worry , currently that only happens in the Bond movie but Microsoft is very much in the process to make you the next Bond with the said technology at your disposal.
The technology has been labeled as SideSight and works in such a manner that it removes the touch from the screen and take it to the side of the device. It can be table, paper or even the air. The devices would use IR proximity sensors and will observe the movement of the fingers on the side of the devide to control it. The device might be a cell phone, GPS or wrist watch. Since the screen size don’t matter anymore, the application of this technology will make everything touch based.
Further details as Gearlog has disclosed them for us:
Touch was a revolutionary concept when it debuted with the iPhone, in part because it was implemented so well with gestures. Pinching, sliding and tapping the iPhone and iPod touch all directly impact the interface.
SideSight removes “touch” from the device and makes it a function of the paper, tabletop, or even the air that’s next to the device. What does this mean? According to Microsoft, it opens up the possibility for “touch” functions to be built into tiny devices that don’t actually need a touchscreen.
“Despite the flexibility of touchscreens, using such an input mode carries a number of tradeoffs,” the paper’s authors wrote. “For many mobile devices, e.g. wristwatches and music players, a touchscreen can be impractical because there simply isn’t enough screen real estate. With a continued trend for ever-smaller devices, this problem is being exacerbated. Even when a touch-screen is practical, interacting fingers will occlude parts of the display, covering up valuable screen pixels and making it harder to see the results of an interface action.”
So what can you actually do with SideSight? Quite a bit, as it turns out. By twisting one’s hands appropriately on either side of the phone, objects could be rotated in place. Pages could be panned and scrolled by moving a hand up and down, and Microsoft also proved that text could be entered and edited on the main screen through a stylus while the other hand scrolled the page — a movement that would be akin to the motions a user’s hands would make if he or she were writing on a sheet of paper.
A quick motion toward the device could also be interpreted as a “click,” according to Microsoft.
The key is a row of tiny optical sensors that look “outside” the device. In a prototype Microsoft built for the paper, the researchers took a HTC Touch mobile phone, and augmented it with two linear arrays of discrete infrared (IR) proximity sensors, specifically ten Avago HSDL-9100-021 940nm IR proximity sensors spaced 10 millimeters apart. Although only the sides of the phone were enhanced, the entire periphery of a device could include these sensors, the researchers said. The sensors can read inputs up to 10 centimeters away, just through reflected infrared light.
Don’t be too excited about the product at this stage as there are still some problems in the way to its practical implementation. The first and the most important in these energy conscious age is the power consumptions of the devices with SideSight technology. The frequent usage of SideSight will drastically cut the battery life and hence make it less practical. The other flip side is the fact that at this stage the sensors can not differentiate between the controlling finger and the stray fingers and hence you might end up with typing with your other fingers folled except the controlling finger.
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This is a technology that will surely rule soon, I first saw this demo by a company that pioneered this technology and are based in “New Zealand”. The latest HP Touch PC already features this technology but sadly this was masked on launch since iPhone was released on the same day!!!!
When I visited this company in New Zealand a few years ago (trying to promote my products for this market) they had informed me they manufacture touch screens and I didnt expect much. They had a touch screen visitor entry log which every visitor had to fill and also get a feel of their product and it was at this point you would go “WOW”
The more stunning application of this technology more than a phone or a PC is a huge projector which could also be a touch screen and I can picture this technology is every board room and conference rooms.
I seriously doubt this technology can be commercially successful in handheld devices like phones. The reason are compelling when you actually understand the inside technology of touch screen. For people not aware of touch screen tech they are broadly classified into four types Resistive (old touch screen phones), Capacitive (iPhone), Inductive (outdoor touch screen) and optical (the one above). Optical sensors are more cost effective only when the screen size is greater than 10 inches and until then the other technologies make better commercial sense (until the cost of optics drop substantially). My 2c on this product.