Tap Tech Brings Touch To Dumb Phones 70
nk497 writes "A Cambridge-based firm has come up with a way to bring touch interfaces to phones without touchscreens. According to TouchDevice, the system uses the microphone to turn any surface on a handset into a touch-sensitive input panel by analysing sound signatures. 'For example, where icons are displayed on a non-touch screen display, you could tap on there and it would activate the application,' said founder Mike Bradley. TouchDevice believes there are two markets for the technology: firstly to augment input potential in touchcreen smartphones, and secondly as a way of adding touch to 'dumb' displays. The system should be making its way into devices by early next year."
A boon for the touch phone knock off makers. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Who cars if it works as well and is cheaper? If it does work as well and is cheaper, expect to see Apple adopt it.
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If it doesn't work as well and is more expensive, expect to see Apple adopt it.
Fixed that for ya
Hey, it's the same thing they did with the antenna...
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That was not Flaimbait. If you go around modding any post that pokes fun at a brand as "Flaimbait", you'll turn Slashdot comment threads into humorless, boring lists of generic observations. You may not agree with the logic of the post, but as the popular sig goes -- "there's no -1 'disagree' mod". Maybe there was some intention of "bating flame", but implying that Apple's response to the antenna problem was, in part, motivated by financ
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Who cares if it works as well and is cheaper?
Because it don't work worth a shite. Learn about technology and how it works before you spout such idiocy.
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Re:A boon for the touch phone knock off makers. (Score:4, Interesting)
If these limitations are OK, they you get a cheap touch screen that lets you use a scratch resistant glass surface.
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I tried this on Rockbox devices and it seemed to work I never did positioning but I tapping was easy. If you listen to the sounds that are recorded when you touch different parts of the device you can hear the difference between four extreme points on the device. The theory behind it is a bit beyond my allotted skill/time though.
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Re:A boon for the touch phone knock off makers. (Score:5, Funny)
Cant wait to see the 10$ iPhony cell phones that use this rather then an actual touch screen.
Could we just let the whole touchscreen idea die instead? Please?
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Make & model or it didn't happen.
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Why? For most things, it's a far better input method than anything else out there.
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Why just phones? I'd like this tech on my netbook. I hope it's open source; I'd install it on my netbook - at least if it works better than the speech recognition. But it seems it may have the same drawback, which is any sound confuses the speech engine. I'll bet this won't work anywhere there are percussive sounds; it has to be pretty damned quiet for the speech engine to work.
Sounds flakey (Score:2, Insightful)
Works great, unless:
Your in a loud room.
Your tap is outside "normal" strength range
You are wearing gloves.
You tap with your fingernail, pen, etc
Just sounds like a hack to me, maybe Ok for Yes/No interactions, but I thought that was what the normal buttons are for...
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What is ti with people like you? you don't know anything about it, but that doesn't top you from listing a bunch of made up issues.
"Your in a loud room." Yep it works in a load room.
"Your tap is outside "normal" strength range"
WTH does that even mean. outside what range? screen range? sound volume?
"You are wearing gloves." maybe it does.
"You tap with your fingernail, pen, etc" - yes it does work under those conditions.
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/touchdevice-software-makes-dumb-phones-touch-sensitive-500 [cnet.co.uk]
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Maybe you should read the articles you're linking to:
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/touchdevice-software-makes-dumb-phones-touch-sensitive-50000706/ [cnet.co.uk]
"InputDynamics says the software can recognise a tap anywhere on a phone's surface to with 1cm square. "
1 cm might not sound like a lot, but when you're talking about ~4" diagonal screen and using your finger being off by 0.4 inches is huge.
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Great! I've always wanted to dial the wrong number!
Re:Sounds flakey (Score:4, Insightful)
You are wearing gloves.
You tap with your fingernail, pen, etc
er... these also don't even work on state of the art touch devices -- androids / iphones / blackberries. Go ahead... try using your iphone with mittens on, or tap one with your fingernail.
So I guess modern smartphones are just a hack to you?
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If tapping with a fingernail does not work, then most likely using a stylus won't work either. Which means that the screen will always be full of fingerprints and smudges, unless I wash my hands every time I want to do something with the phone.
I have a Psion Series 5 PDA, made in 1997 and it works with a stylus. Interesting how people in 1997 knew that fingerprints on the screen = bad, but now they don't.
OK, I'm keeping my Nokia N93 (keypad ftw).
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I never notice smudges on my iPhone unless the screen is turned off. It's a non issue.
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Except that you can use the phone even without the stylus, just that you will leave smudges and fingerprints. So with the Psion Series 5 I had a choice - use a stylus or some other pointed plastic object or just use my fingernail or finger and leave residue on the screen.
Psion also had another thing right - the device uses AA batteries, which can be rechargeable or primary. So if the batteries discharged while I was away from an outlet I could just buy some cheap primary ones. Too bad it was not possible to
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Your in a loud room.
Your tap is outside "normal" strength range
I was expecting to see grammar nazis on the case, but since they seem to be on a break, I'll cover this:
YOU'RE == YOU ARE && YOU'RE != YOUR.
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Sounds like a dump idea at first... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sounds like a dump idea at first... (Score:4, Informative)
TFA talks about doing this with exactly one pre-existing microphone, which is rather unique.
Triangulating touch position using multiple "microphones" (in this case, peizoelectric widgets mounted to the glass surface, but the concept is the same) has been done before, and isn't particularly new. (More info and whitepaper [elotouch.com].)
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TFA talks about doing this with exactly one pre-existing microphone
Which makes me doubt the idea. Are all microphones in smartphones created equal? Will the ones installed in most devices be good enough for the job? Microphones "degrade" (they deform slowly) with use -- can you recalibrate the software, and how often will you need to do so? After filtering out all of the noise, and then attempting to infer the touch location, will you have any CPU power left to actually perform the task that the touch was intended to do (and what about on devices with less computing powe
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TFA talks about doing this with exactly one pre-existing microphone
Which makes me doubt the idea. Are all microphones in smartphones created equal? Will the ones installed in most devices be good enough for the job? Microphones "degrade" (they deform slowly) with use -- can you recalibrate the software, and how often will you need to do so? After filtering out all of the noise, and then attempting to infer the touch location, will you have any CPU power left to actually perform the task that the touch was intended to do (and what about on devices with less computing power)?
Maybe the tapping makes a different sound based on where you tap. So the right side of the screen would sound different than the left. And of course the device would need a teaching system, like with voice recognition. You cannot expect that a plastic Samsung sounds the same as a aluminium Nokia.
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Maybe you two should go read TFA. And then, maybe, you wouldn't have so much uncertainty about what is being claimed to have been accomplished.
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But with multiple microphones, sounds will come in out of phase. It should be possible to compute the delay time of the signal coming in on each microphone, which when combined with knowledge of the speed of sound should allow it triangulate the position of the tap. Yes, with a single microphone, this would be an abhorrent kludge. With multiple microphones, it works like the audio gunshot detection systems already in use in some cities.
Sound can travel in excess of 500m/s while it is going though solids. To compute the position to within 1mm, the microphone will need to have a precision of 1/500,000th of a second. Audio quality in commercial microphones tends to peak at a few KHz so this is still impossible.
Re:Sounds like a dump idea at first... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Oh and it's in the 3rd paragraph of TFA:
“What we're doing is using the existing microphone to detect sounds - the different areas of a phone have a unique sound signature,” said Mike Bradley, founder of TouchDevice.
GP is talking out his ass.
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New excuse for drunk-dialing your ex... (Score:4, Funny)
directional speaker + clever tapping = (Score:2)
Other aplications (Score:2, Interesting)
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Touch screens are actually pretty cheap. The iphone's is 10 dollars, but I would imagine you could get a larger, less precise one for the same price or cheaper. Even the 35 dollar Indian tablet has a touch screen.
neat but no. (Score:2)
last thing I want to do, if I have to go back to a dumb phone, is to get into a heated argument and have it detect me screaming as a sign to hang up.
Yeah, but, no.
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how about if it detects you screaming it dials your psychiatrist?
If you are screaming in an argument, then you have already lost.
Re:neat but no. (Score:5, Funny)
If you are screaming in an argument, then you have already lost.
NOT TRUE!!! SCREAMING IN AN ARGUMENT MAKES YOU MORE RIGHT!!!
/.'s filters, as it thinks I'm yelling...no sense of humor at all.)
(This bit down here is to appease
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NOT TRUE!!! SCREAMING IN AN ARGUMENT MAKES YOU MORE RIGHT!!!
<Morbo> ARGUMENTS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY!
(This bit down here is to appease /.'s filters, as it thinks I'm yelling...no sense of humor at all.)
I should have waited... (Score:2, Funny)
Non-touch != dumbphone (Score:2)
Simple question (Score:2)
Wouldn't a dumb phone be pretty useless?
Almost as bad as a deaf phone.
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The original research (Score:1)
At CMU: http://www.chrisharrison.net/projects/skinput/ [chrisharrison.net]
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Whoops. http://www.chrisharrison.net/projects/scratchinput/index.html [chrisharrison.net]
The market for this? (Score:1)
This says nothing, of course, about the user themselves. Even if you co
Not really dumb (Score:2)
If a phone is equipped with the hardware and firmware to detect taps and touches on the screen, its not dumb. Its just a touch screen with different technology.
'Dumb' would be a phone with a dial on it. You kids remember dials, don't you? That's what you hear clicking '9-1-1' every time you step on my lawn!
Ramifications (Score:3, Interesting)
What about combination with other tech? (Score:2)
I'm sure this could be useful for making, say, crappy capacitive screens like the ones on the iPhone (yeah, I said it! :p) and Android phones more accurate... not just as a standalone technology.
Same as Carnegie Mellon invention from 2008? (Score:1)
Apparently it is the same concept as covered two years ago in this article:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/15/175246 [slashdot.org]
I wonder if university had any patent and sold it to this company, or it was a parallel invention.
Ambient noise? (Score:1)
I'm curious how well it works in ambient noise. From the looks of the comments I've read here, quite possibly well...
It's also interesting to note that a number of users have mentioned that if it uses multiple microphones then_____. The article talks of using one, and using a "set of signatures". It's basically working by listening to how the tap sounds on one part of the phone compared to another part. While the structure of the shell will play a small role in this, mostly it will be influenced by the elec