Microsoft Research is showing off a new technology that allows them to turn any surface into a touch screen. The wearable system, named OmniTouch, allows “arbitrary, everyday surfaces” to be transformed into surfaces allowing multitouch input.
A fairly good amount of information about OmniTouch has been posted on a Microsoft Research webpage. The wearable part of the system is a combination of a laser-based pico projector and a depth-sensing camera. The camera, a prototype by PrimeSense, is very similar to the concept behind the Kinect sensor except the use range is much shorter instead of the 6-8 feet of space required for Kinect.
Hrvoje Benko, from the Natural Interaction Research group at Microsoft, talked a bit about the OmniTouch saying, "We wanted to capitalize on the tremendous surface area the real world provides."
There are a good number of research challenges for a project like this. First, the system needs to know exactly how to identify a finger. Also tricky is how OmniTouch defines surfaces and how to detect that those surfaces are actually being touched. All three of those things must be accomplished without any sensors. Those challenges were identified by a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University, Chris Harrison who is involved in research on the OmniTouch.
Harrison’s website devoted to his OmniTouch research includes some very neat videos showing off the technology as well as numerous pictures displaying the tech at work on different surfaces. All of this feels very Minority Report to me. It will be interesting to see how this type of touch input evolves in the next few years. I would be very interested to experience a system like this if Microsoft could package it up into a neat little consumer device.
