Archive for the ‘FTIR Multi-Touch’ Category
The promise of fiducials, dangers of lasers, and pretty colors
My FTIR surface is close to finished, I’m excited to have it finally working. Soon, I’ll be purchasing a short throw projector, but for the time being I can play with my company’s projector. I’m very excited. I’m not sure exactly how it’s going to feel when I’m dragging my finger along the projection surface.. I’m actually quite concerned. Consequently, I’ve been looking into creating an LLP(laser light plane) multi touch surface.
Using laser light planes you can create a multi touch surface utilizing glass (instead of acrylic) that requires zero force to activate, unlike FTIR. Even when you drag your fingers your blobs always remain vivid. Unfortunately, there’s one primary drawback… It uses lasers. This means that there’s a chance that the laser light can get reflected off a highly reflective object (see: silverware) and blind some poor sap. What’s a guy to do? I’m hoping that i’ll be able to use low enough intensity lasers that –once dispersed into a plane, instead of a beam– will be weak enough not to harm anyone even in the unlikely situation that someone eats cereal from your surface.
Creating an LLP surface also has another distinct advantage. There’s a good chance that one would be able to create a type of fiducial as seen in this thread on the NUIGroup forums. That would be extremely tasty.
Finally, I am creating a page to index the best multi touch videos from the web. Hopefully, someone will come across this blog, see the videos, and become interested enough to join the community. Please check out the video archive and feel free to contribute anything you’d like.
Shawn’s FTIR prototype test #1: Success!
This video shows my polished acrylic and prototype u-channel with half a dozen IR LEDs. As you can see we’re not using a compliant surface so we have to press a bit to get nice blobs, but there they are.
