On a recent trip home to Knoxville, Tennessee, I had a flashback. Not an acid flashback (I don’t think). We were weaving through the hilly streets of downtown in the shadow of the Sunsphere, a discoball of a monument built for the 1982 World’s Fair, and suddenly I was there in the crowd, staring at the future.
There’s a fear that touchscreen devices like smartphones and tablets will one day turn kids into lifeless, imagination-less zombies. But technology isn’t all bad. And to bridge the gap between the toys of yesteryear and tomorrow, researchers at the National Taiwan University created a building block toy that can interact with apps on a touchscreen tablet.
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Touchscreen displays in our cars aren’t going away anytime soon. So designer Matthaeus Krenn figured that now was as good a time as any to radically improve their interfaces, replacing grids of ugly buttons and options with an elegant and minimal multi-touch UI —-that the driver doesn’t need to look at.
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Gorilla Glass, Corning’s enormously sturdy
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If this next-generation display technology developed by Asukanet ever goes past the concept stage, the days of huddling over an ATM display to block your balances from prying eyes could be over. With a viewing angle of just plus or minus 20 degrees, the Aerial Imaging Plate has a very specific sweet spot that ensures your private info stays private.
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In an attempt to give touchscreens another level of interactivity, researchers at Disney
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Ubi Interactive and Microsoft have been working together to develop software which can—with the addition of a Kinect and projector—turn any surface into a touchscreen. Now, you can buy the app that powers it for $150.
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These are exciting times for anyone who’s refused to replace their trusty standalone graphing calculator with a similarly capable smartphone or tablet app. Your stubbornness is finally paying off as HP is teasing what appears to be one of the most advanced color touchscreen calculators the scientific world has ever seen. That, or a lame smartphone with a form factor dating back a few years. More »
We spend a lot of our time running our greasy little fingers over all kinds of touchscreens, but they just sit there unmoving as untouchable blocks of colors dart around beneath the surface. The Obake display isn’t quite so lifeless, and it’s just begging to be poked and prodded. More »
Realizing that the oft-promised ‘paperless office’ may never actually come to fruition, researchers at Fujitsu are working on a backup plan that gives printed documents similar tablet-like touchscreen functionality. More »
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