Water-Based Touchscreen Interface


(YouTube Link)


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.

http://taichi.s372.xrea.com/minamo_en.html via Make

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Huh... the method is genuinely surprising to me. I figured there would be a machine that basically replaces the needle/stylus with a laser that could read LP's in a similar method to modern discs and do an immediate, on-the-fly analogue to digital conversion. This way seems way more inefficient. I suppose the digital version would mimic the turntable sound, including what I assume would be "audial impurities" caused by it or an imperfect LP itself.
If the laser digitizer machine thingy that I described above doesn't exist, somebody should definitely invent it. I nominate Colin B.

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This bring back memories. I actually worked at an oldies radio station in the mid-80s that played 78s. That meant music from the early 20th century. Songs were only about two minutes long, sometimes less, and I was the only woman on the air staff, so getting to the far away ladies room during a song was a challenge. I eventually gave up and dared into the men's room.
Years later, I found myself at another station that actually had a wax/vinyl disc cutter in the equipment storage room. It was from the days when that was the only way to record ads, direct to wax. I'm sure anything recorded there was quite wavy and distorted.
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