A Revolution at Our Fingertips - How Does it Work?
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As a consulting research scientist as New York University, Jeff Han lives and breathes innovation. But some ideas are as simple as what you see in a glass of water -- literally in this case. If you look in a glass of water, you will notice that light reflects differently in areas where your hand is in contact with the glass. Now think of a fiber optic cable. Light ordinarily travels in a straight line through such a cable from one end to the other, miles away. But if the cable's surface is made of glass, and a finger touches it, the light won't flow smoothly through it anymore -- the flow is interrupted, with some of it going into the finger, and some shooting straight down. Now, what if you could use those runaway light beams as "pointers" for a computer interface?
Han set about doing just that, coming up with a prototype in just a few hours (all those years spent taking apart electronics when he was growing up paid off). It featured a piece of clear acrylic to which he attached LEDs for his light source. On the back, he mounted an infrared camera to pick up the light beams. Whenever he pressed on the makeshift screen, the camera picked up the errant light beam, pixel for pixel. The camera was even sensitive to how hard he pressed the screen. Han figured he could build software that would treat the touch screen like a graph, with each point of contact becoming a distinct region on the graph. As Han explained in an interview with Fast Company, "It's like a thumbprint scanner, blown up in scale and encapsulating all 10 or more fingers. It converts touch to light."
The next step, now that he had the prototype, was to code some software that would demonstrate what could be done with it. He worked with Philip Davidson, an NYU PhD candidate, to modify several programs to work with his new touch screen. The first software they attacked was NASA World Wind, a free Google Earth-type open source mapping program. Then they created a photo manipulator. More programs followed.
Learning how to use the tool is both fun and intuitive, judging from Fast Company writer Adam Penenberg's experience. In his article, Penenberg describes Han teaching him the one motion he needs to remember -- a circular movement that brings up a menu of applications. Choosing one, Penenberg is quickly "inside the mapping software, overlooking an arid mountain range. Spread two fingers apart, and I'm zooming through canyons...I'm not just looking at three-dimensional terrain, I'm living in it: I'm wherever I want to be instantly, in any scale...It's seamless, immediate, ridiculously easy..."
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