Multitouch feature on any screen ?

29 Jan 2009 - 10:56

Keywords :

Hi,

We all saw minority report , the wide screen demos like the Surface demo from MS Research, or PerspectivePixel (seems Unix based)

And recently on handhelds like this G1 multitouch demo video (which should appear on any capacitive screen soon or later) :

But there is other (cheaper) technology : "Resistive Screen" :

Openmoko people were wondering how to add this feature on the FreeeRunner phone (future one will be capacitive) :

Nothing ready yet, but it could be possible (or not) .

Same topic on Nokia, Symbian etc

BUT there is a BUT , last week the US patent office just validated apple's patent :

"Touch screen device, method, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics "

I am not a Lawyer, but I am pretty sure various hacks are about to appear ... to be continued

Special thanks to rudy, our multitouch investigator ...

Edit :

"Multitouch G1 video" went offline so I replaced with this one from http://lii-enac.fr/en/projects/shareit/linux.html :

News posted January 29th, 2009 by www.rzr.online.fr

Submitted by alh on Thu, 2009-01-29 13:59.

The problem with implementing multitouch on a resistive screen is in the hardware afaik...

Seems though they've found some trick to make it at least see the difference between two fingers and one finger, but I doubt it will be much more then that.

Thats quite far from the true multi-touch possible on a capacitive screen.

multi-touch is so much more then just being able to put two fingers on the screen and rotate/scale a photo... (the apple inspired use case, which btw is such a no-brainer, and I'm sure there are prior art out there that inspired apple to do it... have hard to see that part of the patent would stand up in a court)

I hope they (apple) wont trip the development (and in the extends , them selfs) with this patent...

Submitted by aliennr9 on Wed, 2009-03-11 13:36.

There are already possibilities to bring Multi-touch to any screen scince... hmmm... 10 years Puzzled .
you can see some implementations here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/ubicomphawhamburg

Submitted by alh on Wed, 2009-03-11 13:54.

Yes, using a camera you can do multitouch on any surface, doesn't even have to be a screen, or even flat Smiling

But this is about extending the resistive touch screen technology to support multitouch without adding new and completely different multitouch hardware. (if that was an option, simpler would be to simply throw out the resistive screen and put in a capacitive one instead)