
Touché by Disney Research brings touch control to everyday things - jcfrei
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/05/touche-brings-touch-controls-t.html
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vasco
There's also more important applications for this, for example detecting
common postures and grips on fallen asleep drivers or knives that know when
their not being handled properly. Additionally a world of possibilities opens
up for the blind and disabled if you can inform them of objects they are
touching in a room. I find these applications (and surely many more I am not
enumerating) much more appealing then controlling a phone, but alas, that's
what sells.

Lets hope the eye-candy stuff propels the technology so that the really useful
stuff can be built at a lower price.

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famousactress
Totally! I actually found it really surprising how boring the potential usage
examples in the video were compared to what's possible with some of these
ideas.

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heyitsnick
The jarring switch from "show amazing new tech with countless possibilities"
to "you can train your child how to eat cereal!" made me question whether the
whole video was really a clever parody.

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noonespecial
This seems like an important step towards the fabled "Computronium"(1)
allowing our environments to compute. Heavy handed regulators should pay very
close attention to the consequences of monopolies granted around these ideas.
One misstep allowing the patenting of "controlling stuff with touch" instead
of allowing only the much more restrictive specific methods of detecting that
touch could prune an entire branch off our technological development tree for
decades to come.

(1) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computronium>

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harrisonp
What the hell is that part about kids and breakfast?! "Could be used to
monitor and train kinds to use the right implements to eat breakfast". That is
just messed up.

In all seriousness this is freaking awesome tech. Will definitely be huge,
unless they fuck up the licensing or patent it to death.

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jasonlotito
> What the hell is that part about kids and breakfast?! "Could be used to
> monitor and train kinds to use the right implements to eat breakfast". That
> is just messed up.

Messed up? You're just looking at what it's doing, not how it can be applied.
The ability to monitor a child with special needs with this sort of
application is pretty amazing. Suddenly, this information can be transmitted
and used to assist with therapy. Knowing how often a child uses a spoon/fork
rather than his hands due to real data rather than parents recalling is
powerful.

It also provides powerful feedback. A system setup to remind them child if
they stop using their fork/spoon by showing a picture to remind them. This is
already used in training. Unfortunately, it can't be automated. Tools like
this would allow for that, and the potential is staggering. We are clearly
years away, but this has the great potential to really help people.

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harrisonp
That is a really great point! I was really only appalled by the specific
application of audio feedback used in the demo. And as such I blatantly
discarded the whole idea of feedback systems. But when I think about it, that
area is huge. I really want one of those sensor plates with an arduino
interface!

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jasonlotito
> And as such I blatantly discarded the whole idea of feedback systems.

That happens far too often. You have to disconnect yourself from only looking
at one element though. Generally, you have an interaction taking place in the
form of Event > Action. Something occurs, and then something happens. In this
case, the method of eating is the event. The sound happens to be the action.
However, you can always replace the Action with anything else (you can also
replace the event with anything else.

Basically, this is how you should approach demos. Not as the end, but as the
possibilities.

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samstave
I'd love to see this applied to guns where you have to make a much more
intentioned grip for the safety to be disabled.

a gun that senses it is being held in a weird way will not fire.

I think the first application will be on a mouse. A mouse that has multi-
dimensional touch features would be great.

This will also make creating an interface to control things like the whole
house very easy. Basically enabling complex control of a full building's BMS
easily.

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mhb
Is that a big problem? Why don't the gun owners who perceive that as a problem
use the safety or buy a gun with greater trigger pressure? If they don't do
those things, why would they want to pay to add this feature?

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samstave
Drunks cleaning their gun, kids, poor training. All factors in fatal
shootings.

I am not saying it will solve all this - but if this can be applied, it may
easily reduce it.

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anamax
> but if this can be applied, it may easily reduce it.

Or, it can result in more dead people.

Guns that don't go off when the trigger is pulled get people killed.

FWIW, "cleaning their gun" is usually cop for "the family doesn't need the
stigma of a suicide ane needs the insurance money if any".

There's also some evidence that a lot of the "kid found a gun" are successful
murders (by parents) or, at best, depraved indifference. The families that
have them are usually "interesting".

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doktrin
Can you site some sources, please?

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anamax
IIRC, the stuff about kids is in Gary Kleck's "Point Blank: Guns and Violence
in America" although there was probably some stuff in Philip Cook's "Gun
Control".

I stopped reading the research 10-15 years ago, long after it became clear
that the research didn't have any effect on people's positions.

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anamax
The other good source is "Armed and Considered Dangerous: A Survey of Felons
and Their Firearms" by Wright and Rossi. They were tasked by the Carter
administration with gathering the available research to prove that gun control
worked.

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lukifer
This needs to leap into the marketplace as soon as possible. The music player
concept is brilliant, and that's only the tip of the iceberg.

I wonder about the potential of a screen-less touch vocabulary, such that you
could type a text message without taking the phone out of your pocket. (Siri
is nice and all, but it requires the user to yield control to the Cloud and
pray that it responds accurately.)

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hsshah
Indeed. Pair this with Google's Project Glass and you can avoid the awkward
(in public) voice commands.

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zf1234
And then combine with a motion capture system for your hands to be able to
manipulate virtual 3d objects that give haptic feedback.

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dools
This reminds me of this awesome rant on the future of interaction design where
the author compares the "picture under glass" model of traditional touch
interfaces with the amount of interactivity we have with a sandwich:
[http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...](http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/)

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nextstep
Good! Finally we'll have the technology to train children to properly eat
cereal!

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agumonkey
This gonna fuel so many designers brainstorm. It seems to sit at the right
level of abstraction.

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mikeburrelljr
Mysterious how HN submissions get picked up... I submitted this yesterday via
VentureBeat: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3931173>

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alagappanr
The title makes the difference. :)

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tocomment
Does anyone know how this works in detail?

Also I never understand capacative sensing. Does the human have to be grounded
for it to work? Why not?

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HyprMusic
This site provides a nice, simple overview:
[http://www.analog.com/library/analogDialogue/archives/40-10/...](http://www.analog.com/library/analogDialogue/archives/40-10/cap_sensors.html)

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personlurking
I suppose this puts the tech in Minority Report to shame. Now I'm thinking
Google Goggles/Glasses + Touché.

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jachwe
that's awesome. in this application it would be hard though to sense the
position of these gestures i.e. where in the liquid you touched. but combined
with other sensing technologie (like optical or traditional capacitive) that
would be a HIT.

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sravfeyn
What about the feasibility, commercially?

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benatkin
Worst pun ever.

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babebridou
It irks me whenever a company takes a common word in a language and turns it
into a name or a brand. It feels like the language is being pillaged.

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jQueryIsAwesome
Disney just won a lot of respect by me (and probably by millions of others);
the awesomeness of this is staggering.

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cleverjake
By funding a university research department?

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jQueryIsAwesome
Yeah, and many more: <http://www.disneyresearch.com/labs/index.htm>

