Submission + - Researchers Create Easy Touch-Sensitive Surfaces
iamdrscience writes: "Researchers have developed a way to make almost any surface into a touch-sensitive tablet by just attaching two (or more) cheap piezo-electric sensors. The sensors pickup the minute vibrations of a finger or another object on the surface and derive the location using a technique similar to sonar. The same technique has also been demonstrated on 3D surfaces, including a globe that accesses geographical information on a computer based on where a users touches.
"The system, called Tai-Chi (Tangible Acoustic Interfaces for Computer-Human Interaction), was developed by researchers from Switzerland, Italy, Germany, France and the UK. "We have made a system that can give any object, even a 3D one, a sense of touch," says Ming Yang, an engineer at Cardiff University, UK, who is coordinating the project.
