Some smart students at MIT have figured out how to turn a typical LCD into a low-cost, 3-D gestural computing system.
Users can touch the screen to activate controls on the display butas soon as they lift their finger off the screen, the system caninterpret their gestures in the third dimension, too. In effect, itturns the whole display into a giant sensor capable of telling whereyour hands are and how far away from the screen they are.
“The goal with this is to be able to incorporate the gesturaldisplay into a thin LCD device like a cell phone and to be able to doit without wearing gloves or anything like that,” says Matthew Hirsch,a doctoral candidate at the Media Lab who helped develop the system.MIT, which will present the idea at the Siggraph conference on Dec. 19.
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