Dutch develop world's largest touchscreen
Pinch to zooooom
Behold the largest touchscreen the world has ever seen, probably. Here's a video of it in action.
To create the "Reality Touch Theatre", engineers from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands combined 16 infrared lights and six cameras, along with the 3mm thick, 10 x 2.8m curved acrylic screen, which is the key component of the university's existing 3D theatre.
Six HD projectors behind the screen produce the image. The diffuse IR illumination bathes the rear of the screen in invisible light. The cameras, also mounted behind the screen, detect the tiny amounts of infrared light reflected back from the screen when a person touches it.
A computer processes the information from the cameras, allowing it to detect up to 100 simultaneous touches.
The screen was developed, the boffins say, to aid research into geographic information systems, but it paves the way for lectures and presentations that are far more interactive and engaging than your average overheard projector can manage, let along chalk and blackboard. ®
COMMENTS
In Uni
The big college classes where students(N=700), it was too large to effectively aim a piece of chalk, and sometimes the inattentive students outnumbered the available pieces of chalk 50:1
A professor of mine solved said problem by showing (on a roughly 2~3 meter screen) a close-up of an injection needle being injected in a human eye. Maybe it was just imagination, but I saw Real Fear in that eye.
As sound effect behind it, the screaming brakes of a cargo train making a full emergency stop. You think 'nails on chalkboard' is bad?
Suffice, it was quite efficient in getting our attention...
___
Really, all you need is a .gif, an mp3 and a few lines of code to tie it together as an app. Call it iScream and you can sell it in the app store for $1,99
Oh I see
So this is the new "but does it play Crysis?"?
Minority Report
Hey! Tom: we've finally got your wavy-hand interface working! All we need now is a police state and thought crime. Oh, hold on... ;-)
Brilliant!
I think all this larger and larger TV, willy-waving is all too much, but this actually looks a damn good laugh, especially the paint package they briefly showed.
