Now your floors can read your feet. According to a new invention, multitouch floor is designed to respond to a person’s individual’s shoe pattern, and will identify them by footprint alone. Multitoe is a research project by Caroline Fetzer, Thomas Augsten, Konstantin Kaefer, Dorian Kanitz, Rene Meusel, Thomas Stoff, Christian Holz, and Torsten Becker at the Human Computer Interaction Lab of Prof. Patrick Baudisch at Hasso Plattner Institute.
Professor Patrick Baudisch and his team have developed a multi-touch floor display as multi-touch interactive displays offer a range of possibilities. But due to size limitations with hand controlled interactive surfaces, only a few dozen on screen objects can be dealt with at one time. Baudisch wanted to increase the possibilities by integrating high-resolution multi-touch into back-projected floors. The floor concept can sense pressure and even identify users based on the soles of their shoes. The floor can ignore inactive users, focusing on known users who can use their foot to interact with very high precision. The floor is so precise that users can type on a Qwerty keyboard using their foot.
As said by the team in a blog posted, “We propose direct touch surfaces that are orders of magnitude larger by integrating high-resolution multi-touch into back-projected floors, while maintaining the purpose and interaction concepts of tabletop, i.e., direct manipulation. We based our design on frustrated total internal reflection because its ability to sense pressure allows the device to see users’ soles when applied to a floor. We demonstrate how this allows us to recognize foot postures and to identify users. These two functions form the basis of our system. They allow the floor to ignore inactive users, identify and track users based on their shoes, enable high-precision interaction, invoke menus, as well as track heads and allow users to control several multiple degrees of freedom by balancing their feet.”
The one industry which will be more than interested in this new technology is the Gaming which now has big guys like Microsoft and Sony.
Tags: computer interaction lab, degrees of freedom, gaming, interactive surfaces, internal reflection, new invention, professor patrick, qwerty keyboard