Introducing ....

Hi !

We present, a touch-senstive desktop (what we are hoping to be India's very first). This is a user interface that allows people to interact with digital content the same way they have interacted with everyday items their entire life: with their hands and with gestures.


[ a snap of our touch sensitive table top interface ]

We are students of National Institute of Design(NID), India. This blog is meant to serve as documentation for a classroom project, we are currently doing.Seems very reminiscent of the recently released Microsoft Surface, but yes, we are trying to build new software based applications using this as our basic framework. Moreover, this is completely built in-house, in the workshops of NID.The aim of this project would be to create new and intuitive ways of interacting with digital content/media.

The underlying technology is usually referred to as Multitouch, and is based on FTIR (Frustrated Total Internal Reflection). FTIR describes the internal reflection of light, inside a certain material.

A lot of research has already been done in this field and people all over the world are building such products. Particularly, the NUI(Natural User Interfaces) group (www.nuigroup.com) has been doing pioneering work in the same. We thank them for the help we have already received.

After more than two weeks of work, we have been able to successfully implement a working multitouch system. We now begin the phase of exploring opportunities to build software applications which are based on multitouch. An important aspect of these applications would be justify the need of multitouch technology and highlight the improvements that are made possible by using multitouch.

We will shortly post on how we built it, what problems we faced and what we are planning further ...