TouchSensor
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Touch-sensitive wall might let you control home devices in the future
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Disney Research Pittsburgh think we can do more with our walls. In a research paper they're presenting this week at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, they present a way to turn all of the static walls that do little more than separate spaces into sensing, interactive, smart pieces of infrastructure. The result of their work is a prototype of Wall++, a wall that can track touch and gestures, sense nearby bodies and their positions as well as detect and locate active appliances.
Insert Coin: the ixi-play robot owl monitors toddlers, helps them learn (video)
In Insert Coin, we look at an exciting new tech project that requires funding before it can hit production. If you'd like to pitch a project, please send us a tip with "Insert Coin" as the subject line. Isn't a baby monitor effectively a waste of technology? With a bit more thought and an operating system, couldn't it do much more with its components than just scope your infant? That's the premise behind Y Combinator-backed ixi-play, an Android-powered robot that just launched on the Crowdhoster crowdfunding platform. On top of Android 4.2, a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 CPU, 1GB RAM and a 720p camera, the owlish 'bot has face, card and object detection, voice recognition, a touch-sensor on the head, eye displays for animations, a tweeter/woofer speaker combo and child-proof "high robustness." For motion, the team adopted a design used in flight simulators, giving ixi-play "agile and silent" 3-axis translation and rotation moves. All that tech is in the service of one thing, of course: your precious snowflake. There are currently three apps for ixi-play: a baby monitor, language learning and animal-themed emotion cards. As the video shows (after the break), the latter app lets your toddler flash cards to the bot to make it move or emote via the eye displays, matching the anger or happiness shown on the card. In baby monitor mode, on top of sending a live (encoded) video stream to your tablet, it'll also play soothing music and sing or talk your toddler to sleep. The device will also include an SDK that includes low-level motion control and vision programming, providing a way for developers to create more apps. As for pricing, you can snap one up starting at $299 for delivery around July 24th, 2014, provided the company meets its $957,000 funding goal (pledges are backed by Crowdtilt). That's exactly the same price we saw recently for far less amusing-sounding baby monitor, so if you're interested, hit the source.
RIM's latest patent details automatic volume adjustments based on handset placement
That moment when you physically hurt your ear by mashing your cellphone up against it in a futile bid to hear the person on the other end. That's the very moment that RIM's gunning to make history with its latest patent, which was filed way back in November of 2007 but just granted today. The BlackBerry-maker's patent describes an adjustable acoustic speaker output "based on an estimated degree of seal of an ear about a speaker port" -- effectively a system where the volume can automatically increase if a handset jostles further from your ear. Not surprisingly, the description details "at least one touch sensor" used for detecting the distance between one's ear and the device, and the connecting method of adjusting the audio depending on what information the sensor picks up. We're guessing folks who walk and talk would be keen on taking advantage, but then again, you could just walk around with a Bluetooth headset on. (Keyword being could, not should.)
New use for an old technology brings touch input to... almost anything
Imagine, if you will, a world where everything from the clothes on your back to the glass in your hand was a touch-enabled device. We're not there yet, but thanks to researchers at the University of Munich and the Hasso Plattner Institute, we're closer to just such a touchy-feely future. Those German scientists are now able to tell when and where your fingertip touches (or gets close to) a wire using time domain reflectometry, or TDR. It works by sending electrical pulses through a wire and measuring the time it takes for the pulses to return. See, the presence of a finger reflects some of the pulse, and by using an oscilloscope and a computer to view and analyze the resulting waveform, researchers can pinpoint where the touch occurs. TDR has been used for years to find faults in underwater cabling, but only recent advances have allowed its application over the short distances used in consumer applications. In its current form, the equipment isn't quite ready for public consumption -- those pulse generators and detectors need to shed a few pounds first -- but given how quickly silicon's shrinking, it shouldn't be long before our truly tactual world is real.
Stanford builds super-stretchy skin sensor out of carbon nanotubes (video)
An artificial skin that senses pressure, pinches and touch sounds like a macguffin from The Outer Limits (the episode "Valerie 23" if we recall correctly), but that's what a team from Stanford University has cooked up on the back of its pick-up truck. Sensors made of silicon films with a matrix of liquid carbon nanotubes ensure the material snaps back to its original shape no matter how frequently it's pulled about. When compressed, the electrical conductivity of the skin changes, and by measuring where and by how much, it knows the location and pressure of where you jab your fingers. The team wants to combine this super stretchy film with a much more sensitive sensor and if it can do it, then the technology could end up as an artificial skin for burn victims, covering prosthetic limbs or even replacing your multitouch display -- just be careful, you might hurt Siri if you pinch-to-zoom her too hard.
Cirque's GlidePoint NFC trackpad makes online shopping even lazier (video)
We've seen NFC technology pop up in everything from smartphones to windshields, but a company called Cirque has now expanded it to desktops, as well, with its GlidePoint trackpad. Cirque's system is relatively straightforward, consisting of its GlidePoint module (with an onboard NFC antenna) and a simple touch sensor. With these two elements working in harmony, users can scan a compatible card by hovering it over the module, while simultaneously using the trackpad to execute onscreen functions. The company has applied the same concept to its proprietary glass touch panel, as well, which could be integrated at payment terminals, or within tablets and touch-based smartphones. It remains unclear whether we'll see this kind of technology pop up on the commercial level, but for more details, check out the demo video after the break, followed by the full press release.
Apple granted patent on capacitive multitouch displays
It's not the mythical pinch-to-zoom patent, but the USPTO just granted a fairly broad Apple patent on capacitive multitouch displays. US Patent #7,663,607 describes a "transparent capacitive sensing medium configured to detect multiple touches" by way of two sandwiched layers of conductive lines hooked up to an appropriate circuit, and also covers a specific type of multitouch display with a similar two-layer capacitive sensor made of glass. Now, there are certainly other types of capacitive sensors out there, so this isn't a total lockdown, but it's certainly one more arrow in Apple's patent quiver, and at the very least it should spur some interesting developments as competitors try to design around it. We'll see how it shakes down.
Apple patent filing details "touch and go" USB devices
digg_url = 'http://digg.com/apple/Apple_patent_filing_details_touch_and_go_USB_devices'; We already caught sight of a whole batch of Apple patent applications earlier this month, but it looks like the company still has a few more big ideas up its sleeve, which may or may not actually come to fruition. The most interesting of those is what's described as a "Portable Device Capable of Initiating Disengagement from Host System," or a "touch and go" system as AppleInsider calls it. That, as you may be able to discern, is essentially a touch sensor tied to a USB drive or other USB device, which would be able to sense when you touch it (or even when you're about to touch it, apparently), and then disconnect the device from the computer before you're able to cause any data corruption. Better still, the system could apparently also double as a fingerprint sensor in some implementations, and completely lock down the device if an unauthorized user grabs it.[Via AppleInsider]
