Microsoft Research and its “Touch Technology”

Two gods examples about the future that Microsoft is building…

OmniTouch: Make Every Surface a Touch Screen

“We wanted to capitalize on the tremendous surface area the real world provides,” explains Benko, of the Natural Interaction Research group. “The surface area of one hand alone exceeds that of typical smart phones. Tables are an order of magnitude larger than a tablet computer. If we could appropriate these ad hoc surfaces in an on-demand way, we could deliver all of the benefits of mobility while expanding the user’s interactive capability.”

 

PocketTouch: Through-Fabric Input Sensing

“People already try to interact with a computing device through fabric,” says Saponas, of the Computational User Experiences group. “Think of when you try to reach through your pocket to the slider that silences your phone. We wanted to take a different spin by asking: Can we use a higher-bandwidth touch surface to provide a wider range of actual input?”