Posts tagged as:

Computer monitor

Turn Monitor or any Surface into a Touchscreen – up to 120 inches of Poke!

by Jay Garrett on February 2, 2010

Ever feel like your puter could do with the touchscreen treatment?

But why stop there? Perhaps the kitchen cupboard or toilet door could be touchscreen pimped!

Before you say – “Jay, you be crayzeeeee mo fo!” Listen up.

Well……… read on.

A certain Portuguese company by the name of Displax has created a polymer film that can do just that, for up to 120 inch screens.

It doesn’t just have to be glass for this stuff to work — apparently plastic and wood can be made into an interactive screen!

As far as multitouchiness goes – I reckon 16 fingers making shapes on its surface and the fact that it can even recognise when someone blows across it should suffice.

If your brain is ready to go into melt-down those lovely folk from Wired explains the tech behind this stuff:

“A grid of nanowires are embedded in the thin polymer film that is just about 100 microns thick. A microcontroller processes the multiple input signals it receivers from the grid. A finger or two placed on the screen causes an electrical disturbance. This is analyzed by the microcontroller to decode the location of each input on that grid. The film comes with its own firmware, driver–which connect via a USB connection–and a control panel for user calibration and settings.”

Displax reckons that the first screens using this boggle-your-mind cleverness should be on sale in July.

So – where would you give the touchscreen surface treatment to?

I need to know!

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

{ 0 comments }

One in the Eye of Augmented Reality – AR Contact Lens

by Jay Garrett on November 14, 2009

One in the Eye for ARAR seems to be the latest coolest thing.

There’s app’s appearing like Kooaba and Layar that overlay info in real-time over real objects but that’s not enough.

Nope – not enough for a team at the University of Washington who’s busy developing a prototype contact lens that would function as an LED computer display, projecting images directly into a wearer’s retina.

This has been going on since January 2008 and now the team is preparing to show off its prototype at the BioCas conference in Beijing later this month.

“Our hope is to create images that effectively float in front of the user perhaps 50cm to 1m away,” says researcher Babak Parviz when chatting with the New Scientist.

The researchers reckon uses could include subtitles being beamed into your eye as you listen to someone speaking a foreign language – doesn’t exactly help with your replies though does it? But cool idea none-the-less.

As well as that being a little one-way there’s also the subject of power.

Contacts, obviously, are too small to have a battery fitted to them – not to mention that made me feel a little queasy.

So the team is working on harnessing the tiny electrical current emitted by radio waves, specifically from mobile phones.

The hope is that mobiles, in addition to providing power to the tiny displays, would relay information to them. Perhaps they will also perform some more of the processing as well.

So – contact lenses seem to be getting some attention again.

There’s this AR lens, the self-darkening lens shades but Rob Spence beats both.

Remember him?

He’s that Canadian film-maker who’s planning on using a camera embedded into one of his prosthetic eyes to capture footage for a documentary about public surveillance.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

{ 0 comments }