Display System That Knows Who You Are

lee1 writes "New Scientist reports on an 'interactive computer display that keeps track of multiple users by differentiating between their touch'. The system consists of a touch-sensitive screen that can be operated by several users simultaneously. When a user touches the screen an electrical signal is sent through their body and picked up by a receiver located in their chair, telling a computer precisely where the screen was touched and by whom. Applications could include system access control, safer vehicle controls, and smarter videogames. The bottom line, in the words of one of the inventors: 'If the controls know who is operating them, they can behave appropriately.' The movie even has funkier than average background music."

The Musical Chairs Problem

[HTH NE1]

When a user touches the screen an electrical signal is sent through their body and picked up by a receiver located in their chair, telling a computer precisely where the screen was touched and by whom.

Of course the chair would also need to be able to read the RFID tag implanted in your butt to solve the Musical Chairs Problem.

Great!

[imemyself]

Wow, sending electrical signals through my body! What's not to like about that. I'm sure it will never mess up or anything...

Wait until Sony gets a hold of this....

[ip_freely_2000]

...instead of allowing anyone using the computer to see and hear their DRM content, they can charge everyone who sits at the same person for the privilege.

Oy vey.

Not a great example movie

[Shawn Parr]

Wow, that movie doesn't really show how the user detection works at all really. The section with the two different boxes was supposed to I guess, but since both users just made the boxes jiggle around it wasn't effective.

Definitely we can see that multiple input works, but that has been shown within the last year or two already, so that is nothing new.

You would think that if the major new feature is this user detection, they would have used different colors for the different users, or found some other method to really show off that it doing one thing for one user (resizing/moving windows for instance), while doing something else for the other user (scrolling through a window, selecting options in a different window, etc.).

And what was with the staged beverage spill. For a technology demo that was pretty weird.

I did find it ironic that the entire demo was done in XP, but they used Apple's website as their demo material.