A Different Kind of Tabletop Gaming - How it Works
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The technology is called DiamondTouch. Picture a 42-inch touch screen covering almost the entire surface of a 47-inch tabletop. This is not quite an ordinary touch screen, however. Its surface is embedded with an array of antennas that conduct electricity.
There’s a reason for this; that electricity completes a circuit with the people who are seated around the table. The level of electricity is harmless; it’s similar to the level that goes through your body when you weigh yourself if you use one of the kinds of bathroom scales that measure body fat. Anyway, the other end of the circuit is in the individual pads that each person around the table is sitting upon. DiamondTouch can currently handle up to five people.
One of the cool parts is that each person is recognized as a separate quantity by the system. That means it knows who is touching the table’s surface. When someone touches the table, their signal gets relayed to a computer (presumably embedded in the table). The computer relays the images to a projector, which projects them above on to the table’s surface. Marks made by each person show up in different colors, so you always know who did what.
Currently, the images projected are strictly two-dimensional and on a flat surface – sorry, no holographic chess pieces a la the game between R2D2 and Chewbacca in the very first Star Wars movie. At least, they apparently haven’t figured out how to do that yet. On the other hand, Mitsubishi Electric has a video demonstration of this table in action which you can check out here (http://www.merl.com/projects/DiamondTouch/DiamondTouch.mov). Even the little bit that they show is pretty exciting, and it gives only the smallest taste of the possible applications.
The company is working on expanding DiamondTouch by coming up with multi-display applications – for example, a table plus a wall. I could easily see a simple gaming application where the touch sensitive table is used as a very advanced game controller for a game being played on the screen, but I’m sure you can imagine much better uses. In the work environment, for instance, the technology could be used at a collaborative meeting that involves a presentation combined with some pretty active brainstorming. (This also promises some wonderful ways of messing with someone’s PowerPoint presentation, but I digress).
Next: Possible Applications >>
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