At the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) in Santa Barbara, California this week, Microsoft Researchers are showing off some experimental touch interaction projects that look beyond the flat glass touchscreen and move into different areas where touch-sensitivity could be employed.
OmniTouch, one of the projects making a major appearance this week, uses a pico projector and a Kinect-like depth-sensing camera to project "clickable" images onto any surface. It's actually quite similar to the device we first saw from the MIT Fluid interfaces group three years ago, which utilized a pico projector, smartphone, and camera to put an interface layer over the real world. The critical difference between the two is OmniTouch's use of a three dimensional camera that detects the difference between a click and a hover and allows for a much more sensitive interface...
