Inventor crafts inexpensive gesture-based 3D touchpad
By Darren Murph 
posted Feb 2nd 2007 7:01AM
posted Feb 2nd 2007 7:01AM
While there's been boasting galore about gesture-based keyboards, scanners, phones, and more keyboards, it looks like an elusive inventor has crafted yet another "3D touchpad" which can be moved around and placed on (or under) nearly any keyboard that you'd like to implement gesture-based technology on. As with similar renditions, the pad can detect movements of your hand floating above it, and can create inputs not always possible on a typical keyboard. Interestingly, this flavor can purportedly work on standard boards, underneath laptop boards, and even under the "screen of a PDA or cellphone." While our skeptic gear is still zipped on tight, it's said that a few working examples are already out of the lab, and that the special antennas capable of picking up hand movements wouldn't cost much more than it did to insert "scroll wheels into mice." We'll let the peculiar analogy slide if this thing hits the market for a competitive price, deal?[Thanks, Kerunt]
ha! i was wondering how long it would take for this to show up on here.
It's nice.
br,
www.telecominsight.net
Three friends and I created a similiar device for a group design thesis, it used capacitive sensing similiar to a thermin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theremin) to detect hand movement in a 3D space. It was very cheap to produce, the sensors were essentially cardboard, wire and tinfoil. The tough part is deciphering the information you get, and that can be done via a driver using system resources, so I don't doubt that it would be cheap to produce.
Actually, if you look at the press photo engadget used, you can see the sensors. What looks like two pieces of cardboard wrapped with wire.