John Nack on Adobe

October 13, 2007

Multitouch, holograms, & other next-gen I/O

• A team at USC has built a holographic "360° Light Field Display" using a spinning mirror, and the resulting video is pretty amazing.  Note: Do not attempt to make out with images depicted this way.  (I do wonder if you can sing "Iron Man" into it, as you would an oscillating fan.)
• Italian design firm V12 Design+Engineering has come up with an interesting proposal: the Canova dual-display touch-screen notebook computer.  Here are additional images, including a mockup of the device running Photoshop. [Via Rob Corell]
• The Ecko LCD bus shelter is designed to let passersby scribble graffiti via Bluetooth-enabled cell phones; here's a slightly larger image.  I'm having trouble finding more on the topic, making me wonder whether it ever got out of the concept phase.
• Helsinki's CityWall collaborative social space "is a large mutli-touch display installed in a central location in Helsinki which acts as a collaborative and playful interface," enabling navigation of specially tags media from Flickr & YouTube. [Via]
• The crew at Minimaforms has brought SMS-driven laser writing on smoke to Bristol's OFFLOAD festival. [Via]
• CNET has posted additional images & details on the Microsoft Surface touch-sensitive screen.
• My old colleague Noah Mittman offers a useful clarification regarding "haptic interfaces": "For an interface to be haptic, touch must be its output"--not just the input.  He points out a crazy haptic glove shown this year at SIGGRAPH.  See also this CAD interface that simulates sculpting.
• For more info on how these things have evolved & where they might be going, see Robert Cravotta's history of gesture interfaces. [Via]
  

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