Touchscreen Created From Solid Ice (video)
Nokia researches in Finland have created a fantastic demonstration ubiquitous computing. Where computers are embedded into everyday objects such as tables, walls or doors.
In this case a solid wall of ice was created using ice blocks cut from a frozen river to build a 2 x 1.5 m (6.5 x 4.92-feet) wall of ice. The surface of the wall was then blasted with a heat gun to create a smooth interactive surface, ready for touch either with gloved or bare hands.
The tean then pointed near-infrared light illuminators toward the wall and positioned an array of infrared cameras pointing through the ice to focus on the front surface.
As a users moves their hand across the ice surface causes light to reflect towards the camera array and a computer then translated the signals from each camera in the array into the precise location, size and motion of the hand.
This data is then sent to a computer which converts the results and transfers the final calculations to a projector where images like flames can be made to appear beneath the user’s hand.
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/11/touchscreen_made_of_ice.html
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