IDEO Labs

Continuing our multi-touch research, we’ve been working on turning an off-the-shelf rear projection TV into a multi-touch display.  This screen has the best width-to-depth ratio of any multitouch system (67″ diagonal viewing area and only 16″ deep).  This is also the first example of hacking a multi-touch system into an off-the-shelf television.  The system we settled on uses very few additional components and could potentially be applied to any rear-projection TV.

The display is only 16″ deep

Setup and Theory

The system has four IR lasers mounted in the corners.  Each laser has a line generator on it (line generators are put on laser-levels to create a line of laser light).  The four lasers produce a plane of infrared light across the entire surface of the screen.  When a finger intersects this plane of light, the light illuminates it.  We have two cameras inside the TV that look at the interior of the screen from the inside.  These cameras have filters on them that only allow infrared light through.  The cameras see the “blobs” of infrared light and track these points.

Below, we’ve posted as much information as we have to enable you to build your own version!

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Our tireless multi-touch team is pleased to announce another bit of software meant to make your prototyping life a bit easier, via support for using a wiimote with our flash API to quickly turn any TV or projection surface into a multi-touch environment. 

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At IDEO we’re all about building to think. Learning from books and websites and product demos is cool, but we think the really good stuff comes when you get in there and start messing around for real.

In the case of multi-touch interfaces, that meant building a system we could start prototyping on. What we wanted was:

• a multi-touch display large enough to facilitate use by several people at once
• an API for flash that would let us quickly prototype multi-touch interfaces and applications

It took us about 5 weeks to get everything together. Kyle, one of our all-around gearheads, had already been building a drafting-table-style FTIR system in his garage which helped kick-start us.

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At IDEO we’re pretty excited about multi-touch interfaces.

Most people who have heard of multi-touch know of it in the context of the iPhone. Being able to use more than one finger on the iPhone’s screen means support for some pretty intuitive interactions. Pinch a map to zoom out. Slide a finger to scroll through photos. Multi-touch is a big part of that little device.

But when you’ve got a large screen with multi-touch support, that’s when things start to get really interesting.

Most computer interfaces today assume a single user. Whether a screen is small or large, the computer powering it is usually designed for one user. There’s one keyboard and one mouse. And even if you were to add another, the software only allows for one cursor. Every interaction assumes a single user.

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