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Calquon’s computer has a very sensitive touchscreen interface. Even a fly can navigate reddit with it. But I didn’t see him upvote anything. Come on, bug, contribute!
Link via Geekosystem
In a land of high-tech toilet and strange robots, a regular ol’ vending machine just won’t do. So behold, the vending machine in subway stations in Tokyo that uses 47-inch touchscreen panel to sell you drinks:
A 47-inch touchscreen panel dominates the front of this beast,
which shows two tall eyes when in sleep mode and switches to the storefront mode, which displays available drinks (and hides ones that are sold out, so that no ugly red “Sold out” buttons appear). Payment can be made in the traditional hard money method, as well as with a Suica or a FeliCa on a cell phone.What makes this vending machine even more interesting is that there is a camera above the screen that determines the age and gender of a person standing in front of it, which the machine uses to “subtly” offer demographically-targeted drink selections, as well as collect marketing data based on customer’s actual choices – no identifiable images or information are stored.
Akihabara News has the story (and video clip): Link – via Core77
Previously on Neatorama: Strange and Wonderful Vending Machines
This week, Microsoft filed a patent for a new type of touchscreen that can display variable textures:
Whereas previous screens produced only an illusion of texture, Microsoft proposes producing a real texture, using pixel-sized shape-memory plastic cells that can be ordered to protrude from the surface on command.[...]
Microsoft’s named inventor, Erez Kikin-Gil at the firm’s Redmond campus in Washington state, says in the patent that the idea is aimed at large table-sized computing displays such as the company’s Surface, rather than phones or tablets.
A projector built into the Surface displays a computer image onto the table top from below. As the user touches it, infrared reflections from their fingertips are detected by cameras beneath the table and used to pinpoint the position of the finger and lend touchscreen capability.
In the patent, Microsoft proposes coating the display with a light-induced shape-memory polymer. This becomes hard and protruding when one wavelength of ultraviolet light is transmitted at a pixel, and soft when another wavelength hits it. By modulating these wavelengths, texture can be created, the patent claims.
It is this difference which sets Microsoft’s design apart from other variable surface touchscreens.
Link via DVICE | Image: Paramount
Taichi Inoue made this unique touchscreen system. As the pictures at the link illustrate, the screen lies at the bottom of a water tank about eighteen inches deep. But the user needs to insert just two inches of a finger into the water to activate a feature on the screen. Inoue accomplished this by directing a webcam at the surface of the water. The webcam then measures the location and depth of the finger to provide instructions to the computer.
Researchers are Carnegie Mellon University are developing touchscreens that are textured to provide a variety of different shapes for users to interact with. If I understand this video correctly, this is more than just a shaped screen. The buttons on a single screen can actually change shape to present different types of interfaces. This technology could be very useful for the visually-impaired or people who want to use a machine while looking at something else.
Microsoft’s cool Surface computing device costs $12,000 and is not yet available to the public, so the folks over at Maximum PC decided that they’re going to build their own Surface-like computing device using open-source software.
The result: a fully-functional multitouch device that lets you play games, manipulate documents, and use google earth-like applications. The final price of all the custom hardware was less than $500, not including the actual computer and a borrowed projector.
Maximum PC’s post details their entire build process and explains the technology behind their DIY multitouch machine:
There is, it turns out, a whole community of very smart folks out there on the internet perfecting the art of building DIY multi-touch surfaces. The process isn’t exactly simple, but the results we saw were stunning: multitouch surfaces with responsiveness rivaling Microsoft’s $12,000 offering, built in a garage on a shoestring budget. “Future UI article be damned,” we thought, “we’ve gotta build one of these for ourselves.”
And so we did. We documented the whole process, from start to finish, so that you can try building one of your own, if you’re so inspired. We’re not going to claim to have done everything perfectly the first time, so think of this article as more of a build log than a definitive how-to.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by notdagreatbrain.
