Have you ever heard of transparent rubber, well I hadn’t. But these gifted Japanese seem to know everything. They do know the concept of transparent rubber - not just that, they now it so well that they have developed an entire touch interface based on it. Yes, an interface. You thought only glass and plastic could make good computer interfaces?
The system has been built by Hideki Koike and his team at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo. This squeezy or rubbery interface is based on a large LCD panel built into a tabletop, where it is used as any other touch interface to navigate through things.
The interface system uses camera that senses polarized light from below, the flexible objects effect this light from the screen which is tracked by the camera on top, thus marking the changes. This allows the rubbery objects to be used to interact with computers, two different experiments have been worked out by the engineers to explain this, you can see them here in the video
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The engineers plan to make the concept more compact by stuffing a camera within the system itself, this could reduce the problem (faced now) of the persons hand interfering in between the camera and the screen, disallowing the camera to track the changes.
Via: NewScientist
