Multi touch screen

[Hans_]

weirdami wrote:
He might be infringing on any number of those 200 patents Apple filed for the iphone.

No he won't. He developed this before Apple did. In fact, apple's product could even be based on his work.

And this won't be all that expensive either as the key components are:
- an SVGA projector
- a camera
- an acrylic screen (or some other material)
- a handful of white LEDs (might become infra-red later)

That's it. There's a software element involved as well. It interprets the images caught by the camera. Fortunately, it's pretty simple.

Hans

[Hans_]

@weirdami

It IS a touch screen. It's just that a camera is used as part of the touch sensor. It used something called frustrated total internal reflection in order to highlight where the user has touched the acrylic screen. The camera then captures this and a computer vision algorithm interprets the images and extracts the touch locations (and "pressure" too, I think).

This is why it's going to be much cheaper than other options. It's also why this technique is scalable to huge touch screens. Jeff Han has created something that is incredibly intuitive to use and will be affordable. That's why this has a chance to actually get mainstream use.

Hans