Boy things are sure changing in this old world.

The computers of the future might be nothing more than display screens if the full potential of multi-touch interfaces is realized.

As demonstrated by New York University consulting research scientist and Perceptive Pixel founder Jeff Han at the 2006 Technology Entertainment Design (TED) conference, multi-touch technology allows a user (or users) to affect the screen with as many fingers as possible at the same time. This makes typing, magnification of pictures, windows and text, as well as shaping images on the screen, possible with intuitive hand movements. For example, one application Han demonstrated allowed him to quickly finger-draw crude puppets onto a large touch screen and then animate them with finger movements.

Previous touch screens have used technology such as resistive metal coatings that register changes in electrical current at the point of contact or spring mounted strain gauges, but those only allowed the software to process a single touch at a time. On the Perceptive Pixel touch screen, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) line the edges of a 6-millimeter-thick piece of clear acrylic, reflecting infrared light along predictable paths on the screen’s surface, a phenomenon known as total internal reflection. When something touches the screen, the light disperses outside of the surface from the contact point. A camera behind the acrylic captures the light diffused from any and all contact points, and image-processing software interprets the touches in real time.

In the future, Han said, he hopes that the technology will pave the way for large interactive white boards and touch-screen tables and walls that multiple users can interface with. Han said that this is the most interesting application of the technology, since a group of users could all collaborate on one project, on one screen, at the same time.

The first wall-sized version of Perceptive Pixel’s multi-touch screen is set to go to an undisclosed U.S. military customer within the month.

Kind Of Intersting.

A team of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has created a new optical coating that enables greater control over the basic properties of light. The world’s first material that reflects virtually no light can eliminate unwanted reflections, and has been an active technological goal of scientists for years.

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What you need to know – Conventional View
• Most surfaces, from a puddle of water to a mirror, reflect some light.

• One type of optical coating is an anti-reflection coating, which reduces unwanted reflections from surfaces, and is commonly used on spectacles and photographic lenses.

• Conventional anti-reflection coatings, although widely used, work only at a single wavelength and only when the light source is positioned directly perpendicular to the material.

• A technique called oblique angle deposition strongly reduces or eliminates reflection at all wavelengths and incoming angles of light.

• The oblique angle evaporation technique is already widely used in the industry, and the design can be applied to any type of substrate — not just an expensive semiconductor such as aluminum nitride.

• This is material with a refractive index of 1.05, which is extremely close to the refractive index of air and the lowest ever reported. Window glass, in comparison, has a refractive index of about 1.45.

• The refractive index is a fundamental property that governs the amount of light a material reflects, as well as other optical properties such as diffraction, refraction, and the speed of light inside the material.

• The new optical coating could find use in just about any application where light travels into or out of a material, such as more efficient solar cells, brighter LEDs, “smart” lighting, high-reflectance mirrors, and black body radiation.