as a small block of wood, like a mouse on the UnMouse Pad, but more interestingly one can use multiple fingers to write and draw on the pad, creating the corresponding content on a computer screen.
An undergraduate student of Perlin’s, for example, has used the UnMouse Pad for animation; one of the student’s hands moved the “paper” around on a screen while his other hand drew on it. “You rethink how you interact with information,” says Perlin. “It’s much more human friendly.”
The UnMouse Pad is part of Perlin’s focus on creating innovative but low-cost technology. “Rather than use a large number of wires and expensive circuitry, we use a sparse set of force-sensing wires on the surface—one wire every quarter of an inch—and that’s sufficient,” he explains. “Our approach allows us to measure continuous position in the spaces between the wires, using simple and low-cost electronics.”
Fortunately for Perlin and other researchers, there is now a large arsenal of relatively inexpensive motion-sens-ing equipment for gestural and multitouch input.
The most ubiquitous touch screens, such as ATMs and airline kiosks, measure a finger’s position as it presses a layer of transparent indium tin oxide that is charged from the horizontal edges of the display to a layer that is charged from the vertical edges. Except for light pens that use the onscreen image to find where the tethered stylus is, most touch sensing today requires calibration. One can imagine a calibration-free technology that could be integrated into flat-panel displays. The approach could use the thin film circuitry in the display as an array of antennas. Modified driver chips could be used to measure the changes to the electrical field in patterns at different pixel locations in the display. And software could sort the changes in a high-frequency electrical environment of the local pixel circuits to locate where and how many fingers are touching the screen.
commercial success The iPhone’s commercial success— approximately 10 million units sold and counting—has been a giant step
forward for the mainstreaming of multitouch technology. “The iPhone is important,” Perlin notes, “because it tells people that using multiple fingers to interact with computers via hand gestures is a natural, wonderful thing.”
Bill Buxton, a senior researcher for Microsoft Research and a pioneer in human-computer interaction and computer graphics, envisions a future of multitouch devices with their own specially designed operating systems and applications. “One solution I see,” Buxton says, “is that we will start building new classes of computational devices that are not constrained by the legacy applications that were designed for a very different style of interaction.”
Buxton believes future technology will create new relationships between typical consumer devices and multitouch screens. “What is really fascinating to me is when you combine the ability of not just the sense of touch of my fingers, but when different objects—a phone or a camera—makes a relationship with the use of my hands and gestures,” he says. “This will lead to a convergence of multitouch surfaces and what is known as tangible computing.”
New multitouch surfaces also mean new finger and hand gestures, and along with the development of multitouch operating systems and applications, Apple, Microsoft, and Perceptive Pixel are investigating how to best use multiple fingers and hands for multitouch input. “A lot of our research is coming up with gestures and manipulation metaphors,” according to Han, such as how a CAD designer could manipulate multiple parts of an
swiss security researchers have
developed four attacks that can
detect what a person is typing
on a keyboard by analyzing the
signals produced by keystrokes.
according to the researchers,
doctoral students Marti
vuagnoux and sylvian pasini of
the security and cryptography
laboratory at the swiss ecole
polytechnique Fédérale de
lausanne, keyboards are “not
safe to transmit sensitive
information.”
vuagnoux and pasini tested
11 keyboard models connected
to a computer via a ps/2 or usb
slot and found that each of the
keyboards was vulnerable to
at least one of the four attacks
they devised. (The attacks also
worked with laptop keyboards.)
The researchers used a radio
antenna to “fully or partially
recover keystrokes” by spotting the
electromagnetic radiation emitted
when the keys were pressed.
vuagnoux and pasini have
stated they believe “our attacks
can be significantly improved,
since we used relatively
inexpensive [equipment].”
“am i conversing with a human
or a computer?” is a question
that a dozen judges grappled
with at the annual loebner
prize competition held at the
university of reading.
in 1950, british mathema-
tican alan M. Turing suggested
that a computer could be said
to be thinking if, in a text-based
conversation, its responses
are indistinguishable from a
human’s. Turing predicted that
by the end of the 20th century,
computers would have a 30%
chance of being mistaken for
a human in a five-minute text-
based conversation.
in the 18th loebner prize
competition, elbot, one of six
programs, nearly passed the
Turing test, tricking 25% of judges
into believing it was human. each
of the six programs fooled at least
one judge.
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