appleinsider.com — Among his expectations are touch-screen iMacs, as well as "tablet-like" notebook devices that provide basic computing without the need for a keyboard or stylus if the user desires to keep the device closed. "We also expect new touchscreen video iPods, more phones and possibly even TVs in the future
Mar 14, 2007 View in Crawl 4
macparrotMar 14, 2007
I don't know....AAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaahhhhh
herolintMar 14, 2007
@blinkcowz182The TouchStream LP keyboard (and some of the other products sold by TouchStream) were multi-touch. You could do things like move windows around, standard mouse moves and clicks, cut, copy, paste, and perform macros (if I remember correctly) all from your multi-touch keyboard. Very nice keyboard, actually. Too bad they don't make them anymore.TouchStream also had a keyboard for Apple laptops to replace the standard keyboard. I think they offered their keyboards in both Qwerty and Dvorak (which was nice for me since I use Dvorak).Anyway, there you go.
imrankarimMar 14, 2007
we'll see how all this works outimran karim
geminitojanusMar 14, 2007
"table desk-- here is an interesting demo video using the same techniques apple uses.<a class="user" href="http://laughingsquid.com/jeff-hans-amazing-multi-touch-display-system/">http://laughingsquid.com/jeff-hans-amazing-multi-touch-display-system/</a>"Uh, you do know that Jeff Hans sensor is _completely_ different than Apple's, right? Apple's Multitouch system uses a capacitive touch sensor and really sophisticated math to generate the locations of your fingers. Jeff Hans' system, while simpler, uses a system based on Frustrated Total Internal Reflection (FTIR), which requires a projection surface, a digital camera, some mirrors and some depth (meaning his displays can scale up to the size of a small office building, but that they don't scale down to portable devices well at all), and a lot less math (since you're doing object detection and recognition on bitmap images rather than point fields of statistically generated capacitances). To explain Hans' system a bit better: because of the angle the camera is at to the camera, the surface it sees is basically a flat black bitmap due to the properties of the glass-type material (called "total internal reflection"). When you press your finger against it, this reflection is disturbed (frustrated), and some light escapes the glass and is detected by the photo sensor in the camera. Immediately, you can detect where has been touched, and with how much pressure (because of the varying amounts of light escaped). Using the computer to track the objects as they're generated, you can achieve a mouse-like input with any number of objects (as many as the computer can track).With Apple's (formerly Fingerwork's sensor), it's a bit different. Rather than read the entire image at once, which you can't effectively do on a capacitive touch sensor, you read it like you would a memory cell, with a row strobe and a column strobe. Normally, on a single-input sensor, you'd put these capacitances into a small neural network (really just some fine-tuned integration algorithms), which would detect the likely position of the touch based on where the capacitance changed the most in both the X and Y directions. The input step of Apple's sensor is the same (go through and grab the capacitances at every point in the grid), but instead it buffers this information and uses it to generate a capacitance heatmap, and assigns each of the "hotpoints" a modifier based off a finger-detection algorithm (area of greatest capacitance change). The advantage of Apple's sensor is that it can be made flat, and with some even more advanced math, it can detect the angular rotation rate of the finger making the contact, allowing you to detect rotation around a point. So you can tell there is a lot of common technology between the two systems, but they're very different at implementation levels. Apple's system is perfect for integrating into a chip and using pretty much off-the-shelf capacitive touch sensors, and thusly making computing products with. Hans' solution would be good where you have a lot of room to integrate this system into (a battlefield commander's table, or a presentation room). They are not, however, the same thing.
tompahowardMar 14, 2007
Funny you should say that. I did make the same prediction a couple of days after the iPhone was announced (but no-one listened). Without blog spamming, you can access my website via my digg profile to confirm this, in case you think I'm full of it.
Closed AccountMar 15, 2007
This is old technology. Star Trek-The Next Generation had multi-touch technology over a decade ago.
dmitriyvozJun 25, 2007
Nothing but speculation here, and I think any Digg user could have made the same prediction. Wake me up when a product is actually announced. The same theme on Russian sites: <a class="user" href="http://pivo.in.ua">http://pivo.in.ua</a> <a class="user" href="http://www.alcogol.kiev.ua">http://www.alcogol.kiev.ua</a>