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The Multi Touch Screen This
website will document the latest news on Jeff
Han
and the Multi
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Where to buy Multi Touch screens? *new*
Watch
the Perceptive
Pixel Video
Videos
of the Microsoft Surface
(Video and Pictures) *new* Bill
Gate's Multi
Touch
screen

Photo gallery of the Multi Touch screen.

Where to buy Multi
Touch
screens?
How to make your own Multi
Touch
screen?
The ACM paper written by Jeff
Han
is available for download.
Videos
Perceptive
Pixel
Frustrated
Total Internal Reflection
Does
the iPhone use Multi
Touch
Technology?
March 20, 2007
iPhone and Jeff Han's Multi Touch?Yes, the iPhone uses Multi-Touch technology. * FingerWorks has been bought by Apple in June 2006. * Jeff Han has NOT been hired by Apple to work on the iPhone There were rumors that Apple had tried (unsuccessfully) to hire Jeff at one point to work on the launch of the iphone. NY Times techie David Pogue even asked Steve Jobs about him on the day of the launch. Here's Jeff Hans' response on the iPhone: "The iPhone is absolutely gorgeous, and I've always said, if there ever were a company to bring this kind of technology to the consumer market, it's Apple. I just wish it were a bit bigger so I could really use both of my hands." Follow this link for more information. |
August 10, 2006
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Jeff Han's famous Multi Touch screen as shown on Siggraph 2006. |
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In case you've missed it, this is the video of Jeff Han when he demonstrates for the first time, his intuitive, Multi Touch screen. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, California. Duration: 09:32) Related Links: A conference for thought-leaders in technology, entertainment and design, plus business, science, the arts, music, global issues, and more. |
July 31, 2006
![]() Credit Jared |
Emerging Technologies Video Preview (QuickTime, 18.7 MB) Here's a really cool video giving you a glimpse of the emerging technologies. "A
16-foot-long rear-projected interactive display that has the unique
ability to sense multiple points of Touch
from any number of users
simultaneously with unprecedented precision and accuracy."Contributors Philip L. Davidson,
Casey M.R. Muller, Ilya D. Rosenberg Tomorrow's Treasures, Day 1 - SIGGRAPH 2006 "Today's post marks the first in a series of entries covering ACM's SIGGRAPH 2006 conference in Boston's aptly-named Convention and Exhibition Center. Throughout the coming week, I'll be providing updates of the goings-on in the various exhibition halls of the BCEC, conversely skipping from coverage of SIGGRAPH's Emerging Technologies exhibit to its main show floor, stopping along the way to do some interviews with various folks that may or may not make it to your computer screens. " ... |
July 7, 2006

Jeff Han will be appearing at Siggraph 2006 in Boston. Siggraph is the annual computer graphics and animation conference. This year Siggraph will be in Boston at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center from July 30th to August 3rd.
When and where:
He'll be there on
Monday, 31 July, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm - Room 207
Emerging Technologies Sketches. Also appearing is Paul H. Dietz
Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL)
dietz @ merl.com
Submerging Technologies
Three interactive water displays: a tantalizing fountain that withdraws
when a hand comes near, a musical harp that has water "strings," and a
liquid touchscreen.
Register online at SIGGRAPH 2006. $95 value at the door.
SIGGRAPH
Registration fees list
Free
SIGGRAPH 2006 pass. from Renderosity
Another free SIGGRAPH 2006 pass from NewTek
Tuesday, March
07
The Future of Interfaces Is Multi-Touch
Jeff
Han,
NYU's Department of
Computer Science
Time: 9:10am - 9:30am
Location: Elizabeth Ballroom ABCD
While Touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact, Multi-Touch systems enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, allowing for the use of both hands along with chording gestures. These kinds of interactions hold tremendous potential for advances in efficiency, usability, and intuitiveness. Multi-Touch systems are inherently also able to accommodate multiple users simultaneously, which is especially useful for collaborative scenarios such as interactive walls and tabletops.
We've developed a new Multi-Touch sensing technique that's unprecedented in precision and scalability, and I will be demonstrating some of our latest research on the new sorts of interaction techniques that are now possible." Bi-manual, Multi-point, and Multi-user interactions on a graphical interaction surface."
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2006/view/e_spkr/2684
Here's Jeff Han's transcript at Etech.
Jeff Han at ETech, 7 Mar 2006
Consulting research scientist at NYU's department of Computer Science. This stuff is literally just coming out of the lab right now. You're amongst the first to see it out of the lab. I think this is going to change the way we interact with computers.
Rear-projected drafting table. Equipped with multitouch sensors. ATMs, smart whiteboards, etc. can only register 1 point of contact at the time. Multitouch sensor lets you register multiple Touch points, use all figners, both hands. Multitouch itself isn't a new concept. Played around with multitouch in 80s, but this is very low cost, very high resolution, and very important.
Technology isn't the real exciting thing, more the interactions you can do on top of it once you're given this precise information. For instance, can have nice fluid simulation running. Induce vortice here with one hand, inject fluid with another. Device is pressure sensitive, can use clicker instead of hand. Can invent simple gestures.
This application is neat, developed in lab. Started as screen saver, but hacked so it's multitouch enabled. Cna use both fingers to play with the lava. Take two balls, merge them, inject heat into the system, pull them apart. This obviously can't be done with single point interaction, whether Touch screen or mouse.
It does the right thing, there's no interface. Can do exactly what you'd expect if this were a real thing. Inherently multiuser. Rael, come up and help me out. I can work in an area over here, and he can be playing with another area at the same time. It immediately enables multiple users to interact with a shared display, the interface simply disappears.
Here's a lightbox app. Dragging phtoso around. Two fingers at once, I can start zooming, rotating, all in one really seamless motion. It's neat because it's exactly what you expect would happen if you grabbed this virtual photo here. All very seamless and fluid.
Someone who's new to computing culture can use this. Could be important as we introduce computers to a whole new group of people. I cringe at the $100 laptop with its WIMP interface.
Really simple and elegant technique for detecting Touch point, scattered light by deformation caused by Touch on screen.
Kinaesthetic memory, the visual memory where you left things. Ability to quickly zoom, get a bigger work area if you run out of space, etc. changes things. More of an infinite desktop than standard fixed area.
Now, of course, can do the same thing with videos as with photos. All 186 channels of TW cable.
Inevitably there'll be comparisons with Minority Report. Minority Report and other gestural interfaces aren't Touch based. Can't differentiate between slight hover and actual Touch. Disconcerting to user if they have action happen without tactile feedback. I argue that Touch is more intuitive than gross gestural things. Also gestural is very imprecise.
Ability to zoom in and out quickly lets you find new ways to explore information. What's interesting is that we're excited about potential for this in information visualization applications. Can easily drill down or get bigger picture. Having a lot of fun exploring what we can do with it.
Another application we put together is mapping. This is NASA WorldWind, like Google Earth but Open Source. We hacked it up to use the two fingered gestural interface to zoom in. Can change datasets in NASA Worldwind. They also collect pseudocolour data, to make a hypertext map interface. [Demo stalls, restarts] Three dimensional information, so how do you navigate in that direction. Use three points to define an axis of tilt. Could be right or wrong interface, but example of kind of possibilities once you think outside the box.
Virtual keyboard, rescalable. No reason to conform to physical devices. Brings promise of a truly dynamic user interface, possibility to minimize RSI. Probably not the right thing to do, to launch in and emulate things from the real world. But lot of possibilities, we're really excited.
Lots of entertainment applications, multiuser with many people playing in parallel. Here's a simple drawing tool. Can add constraints and have multiple constraints, to make a reallye asy virtual puppeteer tool. Lot of math under the surface to do what's physically plausible (algorithm published last year at SIGGRAPH). Source
"If you have the appropriate ACM subscription or are prepared to pay $10 to buy it, you can download the paper (4-page PDF) which has more information about the construction here" The ACM paper written by Jeff Han is available.
Low-cost
Multi-Touch
sensing through frustrated total internal reflection
(download
here)
Full
text pdf formatPdf (1.08 MB)
Source Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology archive
Proceedings of the 18th annual ACM symposium on User interface software
and technology table of contents
Seattle, WA, USA
SESSION: Touch
table of contents
Pages: 115 - 118
Year of Publication: 2005
ISBN:1-59593-271-2
Author
Jefferson Y. Han
New York University, New York, NY
Sponsors
SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction
SIGGRAPH: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and
Interactive Techniques
ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
Publisher
ACM Press New York, NY, USA
More information here and more Multi Touch screen research information there
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Jeff Han
Jeff
Han's
research Interests:
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You may want to investigate similar technology first such as screens that support Multi touch-point at once like Lemur's Touch-screen. Research suppliers as Jeff Han's Multi Touch screen hasn't yet made its way into the computer market. Many companies also offer user interface design services which may include Multi Touch screen technology.
"You can buy something like this right now. The Lemur is a Touch screen that supports multiple Touch-points at once, and communicates over Ethernet via OpenSoundControl [berkeley.edu]. I have one on my desk at work, and it works well -- e.g. I can use 5 fingers to drag 5 different balls around the Lemur's Touch-screen simultaneously, and see my actions mirrored instantaneously on the software on my PC." - It won't be an elo Touch screen.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/13/1610250
(more soon)
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Gadgets
galore at CommunicAsia The Panasonic booth was a sure draw
with its Minority Report-like finger-gesture controlled screen. Just
point and click into the air, and everything shows up on the screen a
meter away.
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Check Apple's patent for its Apple iTablet and Touch-screen iPod, iTouch, and iPhone.
YouTube -
Crazy Multi-Input
Touch
Screen
This is a video of a Multi-input
Touch
screen that hopefully will make its way
into consumer computer market in time.
O'Reilly
Emerging Technology Conference - March 6-9, 2006 - San ...
Multi-Touch
systems are inherently also able to accommodate multiple
users ...
Compfused.com
- Multi
Touch
Multi
Touch.
A cool new
technology that has reportedly been licensed by Apple
computers…should be interesting to see what they use it for.
...
http://www.joystiq.com/2006/02/26/patent-application-reveals-nintendos-plan-for-Multi-Touch-capab/
Also worth mentioning is Star Trek.
Directed
by
Steven
Spielberg
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