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Team Members

• Justin Barth
• Jennifer Cofer
• Nathaniel Glab
• Nathaniel Turley
• Jared Yenzer

Need

Technology has granted society today the ability to connect with other people in ways never previously conceived to be possible. Email, internet forums, and social networking sites now connect individuals around the globe that would never be able to communicate otherwise, and face to face interactions across thousands of miles are now accessible on a device that would fit in a pocket. However, as technology ties together people around the world, it has the opposite effect on those who are geographically close. Texting has come to replace a face-to-face conversation, and social networking has replaced real knowledge of one's friends. We spend most of our time staring at tiny personal screens and have more opportunities than ever to put up barriers to the people around us. In short, technology isolates us. Our approach strives to utilize technology as a method to unify people once again.

Objective

In order to encourage more person-to-person interactions while using technology, we want to create an environment in which multiple people work or play together using larger, more open technology. We want to expand the horizons of vision away from the tiny personal screen and engage several different people at once on an interactive level. Thus, for our Capstone design project we are planning to build an optic based true multi-touch table. The vast majority of touch screens on the market today use capacitive touch technology which limits the number of recognizable touches at any given time to less than 10. The goal of our multi-touch table is to expand the number of simultaneous touches far beyond that in the hopes of creating a product that will inspire many people to work together with ease on one device.

Background

There are a few different ways we have found to accomplish true multi-touch, but the one technique that stands out to us is Frustrated Total Internal Reflection (FTIR). To accomplish FTIR we need to flood a thick piece of acrylic with IR light. When an object comes in contact with the surface of the acrylic the infrared light is "frustrated" and sent down beneath the acrylic where IR detection cameras record it as a bright blob. The blobs are sent to software which maps where these blobs are in respect to a display. A projector is placed near the IR detection cameras which shoots the screen image through the acrylic onto a thin diffusion layer. The diffusion layer is simply there to stop the image and prevent the user from being able to see inside the closed off table.

Support

The idea of a multi-touch table, while relatively new, is not cutting edge. Support forums for projects similar to ours can be found online and Microsoft currently sells a more advanced touch table for around $10,000 (ours should be less than $2000). Software for IR blob detection has also been developed and is available as open source. The high cost components will be a high definition projector and possibly a PC with a high end graphics card. These costs may be minimized by using one of our own computers and possibly borrowing a projector from the school. Problems that we foresee center around interfacing our own custom apps and hardware with the open source blob detection software available.