By Dave Wilby

April 15th, 2010

Floored by latest computer interface?

Floored by latest computer interface?

Touch screens have rapidly revolutionised the way in which the majority of us interact with our computing devices. Although we had lived with touch screens for many years in public kiosks and other niche applications, it wasn’t until they began dominating the UIs in our pockets and on our laptops that most of us succumbed to the lure of intuitive graphical interaction.

So how certain are you now that the latest innovation – touch sensitive floors – will prove to be a conceptual fad or a technology cul-de-sac? Perhaps ‘touch floors’ will also become a major part of all our lives more quickly than we might have thought?

New Scientist this week asked us to imagine a world in which submersive gaming would become more sure-footed than ever before, while the way we in we which we chose to enter a room could determine the audio/visual entertainment set up for the evening.

The ‘Multi-toe‘ touch floor is the brainchild of Patrick Baudisch and a team at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany. The prototype is a 0.5mm thick sheet of silicone lying on an eight millimetre thick layer of clear acrylic, both of which sit on a thick glass sheet to provide rigidity. Light beams bounce around inside until pressure from a foot allows them to escape. A camera below then registers an image of whatever was pressing down on the floor.

Baudisch has already hooked the Multi-toe up to video game Unreal Tournament, and even presented the technology at the Association for Computing Machinery 2010 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Atlanta earlier this week.

For the lowdown on touch floors, hop over to the latest tutorial video from New Scientist.