
MIT gestural computing makes multitouch look old hat - nreece
http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/11/mit-gestural-computing-makes-multitouch-look-old-hat/
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marsmatrix
From the video it appears that the UI lags noticeably behind the user's actual
motion. A friend who has demoed Natal mentioned it suffers from a minor lag as
well.

This strikes me as a major problem when one is expecting the screen view to
reflect their current position rather than their future position. For
precision tasks it is akin to giving your mouse cursor acceleration and then
training yourself to decelerate at the correct thresholds.

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cma
I thought Apple had a patent that covers display sensors integrated into a
flat panel display:

[http://www.macnn.com/articles/09/05/19/sensing.display.paten...](http://www.macnn.com/articles/09/05/19/sensing.display.patent/)

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madebylaw
Not sure about the patents but your link says:

 _the Apple patent proposes interweaving photo sensors alongside each pixel
projector_

whereas the linked video shows photo sensors around the edge of the screen,
which they claim is superior to photo sensors between pixels. A subtle
difference, so not sure if Apple's patent applies.

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warfangle
They aren't around the edge of the screen, or along side each pixel - they're
on another plane, behind the LCD. The LCD modulates between the image being
displayed and a pinhole mask.

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clistctrl
Its a great idea, but I wonder what its uses would be considering any long
term use would make the users arm tired.

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bemmu
3D editing with a 2D input device is clunky. If you've ever used a tool like
Blender and tried to position a vertex in three dimensions with your mouse,
you've discovered you have to do it twice from two different angles. With a
system like this combined with a stereo display, you could simply move your
hand to where you want the vertex to be.

Of course there are other ways to achieve that, but there must be tons of
other applications that require 3D input, that's just the first that came to
my mind. Most of what we do every day in real life is manipulating objects in
3D.

