A touchscreen as big as your wall
Is the touchscreen on your prized tablet too small for your liking? Do you wish your entire PC/TV screen could go the way of flicks and gestures? Well, it turns out, Munich-based startup Ubi Interactive not only has the resounding solution to those problems, but it also manages to add a more detailed feature set than you could have thought of as a bonus.
They seem to have figured out how to convert any ordinary wall into a touchscreen. Yes, not a mere screen, not a Minority Report-inspired air-flick station. An actual, huge touchscreen. How do they do this? Ubi’s system uses a Microsoft Kinect sensor to turn a regular projector into a multi-touch PC projection system, where regular PowerPoints, web pages, even games no longer require clickers or wireless mice to be navigated. By using the motion-tracking and depth-perception cameras in the Kinect, Ubi is able to detect where a user is pointing, swiping and tapping on a surface and interpret these gestures as if they were being performed on a giant touchscreen or interactive whiteboard.
“It’s all Windows touch-based gestures,” Ubi explains. “We wanted to start with an experience everyone knows, but we can open up our API for 3D gestures. It knows exactly how far your fingertip is from the surface-when you actually touch it, that's a click; when you’re not touching, it becomes a hovering motion.”
The tech also features depth-based action. Hovering a finger over a strip of book covers projected onto a wall will let you gesture left and right to browse titles from an ebook download store’s app. Actually tapping one of the covers selects that book for download. Awesome, no? We surely think so.
What are the ramifications of such a piece of technology in your living room? I hope you can imagine. The ultimate home theater, that can respond to your gestures sounds straight out of science fiction, and thanks to Ubi, it’s now science fact. What it needs to prove next is that it can scale itself well enough to support the demands of major clients. It'll likely be an interesting business to watch over the next couple of years.
For updates, queries and feedback, follow us on facebook.com/TechChronicle.
Post new comment