Neurontic covers breakthroughs in neuroscience and psychology and is designed to give laypeople a window into the inner workings of the human mind. Orli Van Mourik is a freelance journalist in New York City. Her work has appeared in Psychology Today Magazine .
I was so struck by Adam Penenberg's recent article in Fast Company that I'm going to break my own rule and direct your attention to a totally non-brain related topic: The future of touch screens.
I'm no technofetishist, but even I was blown away by the revolutionary touch screen technology being developed by NYU's Jefferson Han. Han's demonstration at the 2006 TED conference left a crowd of tech-luminaries, including Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page, speechless:
Han began his presentation. His fingertips splayed, he placed them on the cobalt blue 36-inch-wide display before him and traced playful, wavy lines that were projected onto a giant screen at his back . . . With the crowd beginning to stir, he called up some vacation photos, manipulating them on the monitor as if they were actual prints on a tabletop. He expanded and shrank each image by pulling his two index fingers apart or bringing them together . . .
"There is no reason in this day and age that we should be conforming to a physical device," he said. "These interfaces should start conforming to us." He tapped the screen to produce dozens of fuzzy white balls, which bounced around a playing field he defined with a wave of the hand. A flick of a finger pulled down a mountainous landscape derived from satellite data, and Han began flying through it, using his fingertips to swoop down from a global perspective to a continental one, until finally he was zipping through narrow slot canyons like someone on an Xbox.
If you think this description is dazzling, wait until you see a demonstration: The article includes a video clip of Han manipulating his Gibsonesque invention.
Comments
I couldn't find the link in the article, here is one
http://tinyurl.com/36e28f
Posted by: ERIC JUVE | January 19, 2007 1:29 PM
Wait until you see the Apple iPhone, which uses Han's technology (which Apple bought and patented early last year)...
http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/j47d52oo/event/
Posted by: Chris | January 19, 2007 3:03 PM
Han is not the first inventor of multi-touch interface technology. It's preceded by the touchpads and keyboards from Fingerworks (bought by Apple a few years ago--can anybody say "iPhone?"). Even earlier, Bruce Tognazzini developed gestures for a multi-touch interface at Sun in 1993, and he sites previous work I am not familair with.
Posted by: R Simmon | January 19, 2007 3:13 PM
I read this went you sent it out to the listserv. So great! I can't wait for what's next.
Posted by: Gillian R | January 26, 2007 12:13 PM