Thermal Touch

It’s often important to be able to tell whether someone’s finger is hovering a millimetre over the surface of a table, or actually touching it, The physical touch,This is One of the biggest problems for range finding cameras like Kinect ;The resolution which is necessary to do that accurately is very difficult.  But a new invention from a German company called Metaio takes a simple insight and applies it to great effect with a simple thermal camera. It uses the heat signatures left by our fingertips to turn virtually any surface into a touch interface. It’s called Thermal Touch. it’s a tablet-like touch interface, rather than a touch screen.  sometimes the technology might be applied to objects that already have a visual structure on them others will be flat and featureless.In those cases,

The technology utilizes existing augmented reality tech to live-edit some interface element into a video feed, and uses Thermal Touch tracking to coordinate your input with the functional elements. Keeping with the example of chess, your augmented reality glasses might layer the board over your view of the table, and then track which squares you touch for control.Security passwords could be input on a custom keypad, unique to every user or even to every trip through security.  Right now the technology is working with a webcam mounted to a tablet PC,  but the team is working hoping that some sort of video-computing hybrid will be strapped to a large number of people’s faces soon enough.  Whether that might come in the form of some future Google Glass is up in the air.  For instance projecting the controls for your MP3 player onto the arm of whichever shirt or jacket you happen to be wearing.  Skin itself will likely be difficult, since by its nature skin won’t show a lasting heat signature of skin.  Thermal cameras don’t have to be any more expensive than regular ones, and most of us already have two of those in a single handset.

This technology does require actual augmented-reality capabilities which means you need a screen between your eye and the interface, a feature that doesn’t mesh with the off-in-a-corner display on Glass. The team basically stumbled onto this invention because some thermal cameras happened to be lying around the lab. That’s how easily this technology can be adapted to work;you can immediately see the heat signatures we leave on virtually every object. A combination of remote thermal sensing like this, capitative touch sensing like we have in our touch screens, and broad motion-tracking like Kinect could allow truly incredible levels of control. If nothing else, innovations like this one will be necessary if we’re to see the expansion of advertising continue. We can’t make everything into a touchscreen.