Draw with your hands on your screen

October 7, 2005 11:54 PM

Draw on your computer screen with your hands. A touch-screen art program of sorts. I don't own a Mac but this would make me rethink that. [Embedded QT alert]
posted by KevinSkomsvold (38 comments total)

Oh my, that's incredibly cool. Wow.

Unfortunately, the video doesn't show what the pad actually looks like, or give any other examples of uses - but even so, what a cool looking tool.
posted by vernondalhart at 12:11 AM on October 8, 2005

Nicely done, and it actually promises to be pretty sweet to use too. Could have used a car chase but the cameo by Burt Reynolds was great.
posted by fenriq at 12:14 AM on October 8, 2005

Issues:
1. It does not yet exist outside prototype.
2. It will not make toast.
3. IF it makes it to production, it will be usable by both windows and macintosh users.

Most of this information was found on the site's FAQ page.

An alternative to this, which is available yet slightly different/more versatile is the drool-inducing [note: i am a musician] lemur, distributed by cycling '74 in the u.s. Anybody got a spare $2500 they'd like to donate to a "poor" musician struggling to get full use of his hands playing live? - they'd get 10 private concerts from me in return.
posted by phylum sinter at 12:24 AM on October 8, 2005

Well here's what it looks like and here's a use for it as the best crappy calculator ever, and KevinSkomsvold, it's just a USB device that can work with Windows, that is if it were for sale yet.
posted by fleacircus at 12:25 AM on October 8, 2005

The bit where he grabbed hold of the canvas to zoom in and out and rotate was amazing. I wasn't too impressed when he was just drawing circles and squares, but the canvas manipulation, as opposed to the object manipulation, somehow felt really intuitive and tactile.
posted by painquale at 12:27 AM on October 8, 2005

whoah. wrong movie
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 12:43 AM on October 8, 2005

If Adobe got on board and made this thing useable with Photoshop, Illustrator, etc., I would totally drop the cash for it. And yeah, canvas manipulation like that would be incredible.

Drawback: the H. G. Wells-esque camera pod. Kinda goofy.
posted by Pecinpah at 12:59 AM on October 8, 2005

Drawback: $1,000 anticipated price....

I'm not sure on this one.... It would be interesting to see it used for something other than moving around a bunch of squares and circles......... I can do that with my $15 mouse pretty well.
posted by HuronBob at 2:08 AM on October 8, 2005

Good lord that thing looked rad. There was a whole lot of neat stuff packed into that demo. The showcase app was perhaps less than real-world sexy but wow! Some of that two-handed stuff was pretty fancy. I'd think that would be hands-down (NPI) better than mouse+obscure keyboard combination for nearly any task.

Hell, just scrolling down to get here via touchpad seemed to suck by comparison.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 2:34 AM on October 8, 2005

The two-point translate/scale/zoom action is just dreamy, and not exactly $15 mouse-able. Two mice, maybe. I wonder how well it scales to tracking >2 points.

I'd still wait to see it live before putting in a pre-order.
posted by arialblack at 2:39 AM on October 8, 2005

One problem with designing on a computer is the lack of happy accidents when pasting up work on a board. A piece of type would fall over an illustration just so and something magical might reveal itself where you least expect it.

Add a gravity control or "sudden gust of breeze" to this, schlump it into Quark/InDesign and you'd have my $.
posted by hal9k at 3:02 AM on October 8, 2005

Very cool, but at least from the video, I don't understand what it is. Is that the screen, or is that a tablet of some kind? and if it is the screen, what does the actual thing look like?
posted by ParisParamus at 7:13 AM on October 8, 2005

Drawback: $1,000 anticipated price....

Most Wacom tablets are cheaper, so I don't think the TactaPad will be that much. Speaking of Wacom tablets, I think I'll be sticking with mine, thanks.
posted by May Kasahara at 7:16 AM on October 8, 2005

It looks like this.

The mushroom-looking tower on the tablet has a camera, and the hands you see on the screen are your hands.
posted by kirkaracha at 7:55 AM on October 8, 2005

thanks. it's a very cool technology, but i'm not really sure for what. maybe this is like the can opener being invented before the can?
posted by ParisParamus at 8:53 AM on October 8, 2005

thanks. it's a very cool technology, but i'm not really sure for what. maybe this is like the can opener being invented before the can?
posted by ParisParamus at 8:53 AM on October 8, 2005

How fun. They should print a keyboard on the surface of the mat to let it replace the keyboard and the mouse.
posted by leapingsheep at 9:10 AM on October 8, 2005

There is something very very creepy about the restrained, almost lisping voice of the presenter.
posted by mokey at 9:25 AM on October 8, 2005

I'm a film editor and not a graphic designer, and I imagine I'd feel differently if I used Wacom tablets regularly, but I'm skeptical of the demo's claims to do away with "obscure" keyboard shortcuts. If you have more than the eight or so regularly used buttons they've placed on the left side of the screen, I can't imagine it not being more efficient to hit one keyboard command than to start dealing with multiple menu/button levels, even if you can use two fingers to navigate.
posted by nobody at 9:53 AM on October 8, 2005

how long until the porn implementation hits the market?
posted by mwhybark at 10:44 AM on October 8, 2005

I think this is a pretty cool idea myself, but I'm a little skeptical about the claim of single-pixel precision. The pad looks about eight inches across. Mapped onto a 1600-pixel-wide dislpay, that gives you 200 screen-pixels per pad-inch, and that would take some awfully fine motor control.
posted by wanderingmind at 11:00 AM on October 8, 2005

mokey: I'll second that. Although, I've heard similar in other demo materials. I think it's also the cadence, which is likely a function of some electronic editing, no?
posted by ParisParamus at 11:04 AM on October 8, 2005

What I'd like to see is this technology in a tablet form. Could then do away with the mushroom since hands would already be seen on screen.
posted by Jawn at 11:48 AM on October 8, 2005

What I'd like to see is this technology in a tablet form. Could then do away with the mushroom since hands would already be seen on screen.
posted by Jawn at 11:48 AM on October 8, 2005

Jawn, the "mushroom" holds the camera, which allows it to display your shadow-hands on screen even when not in direct contact with the pad. Am I misunderstanding something?

Ah (on empty preview), you mean a tablet that doubles as the display. The problem there is that you won't be able to see what you're manipulating. Also, without the mouse-like cursor appearing onscreen representing the functional touch-point (your hands would be in the way) you wouldn't have any feedback for fine control. The lemur tablet/screen mentioned upthread is mostly for manipulating sliders, buttons, and two-variable grids -- basically a customizable midi interface. The fancy thing is that you can program the data-points in the grid to have physical properties like inertia.
posted by nobody at 12:09 PM on October 8, 2005

i was all "wow cool" and then I saw the zooming interfact and then i was all "hold crap awesome"
posted by VulcanMike at 12:43 PM on October 8, 2005

Jawn: What I'd like to see is this technology in a tablet form. Could then do away with the mushroom since hands would already be seen on screen.

Sadly, an NDA prevents me from saying anything detailed in reply to this.... Except to say that nobody's claims that you wouldn't be able to see what you're manipulating with such a "theoretical" device are probably not true.... :)
posted by hincandenza at 12:54 PM on October 8, 2005

wandering: yes, not to mention that your pointing device is the fleshy tip/pad of your finger. I'm sure that they can get a meaningful estimation from spatio-temporal pressure measurement, but precision might be a carefully chosen term in this context.
posted by arialblack at 12:57 PM on October 8, 2005

How would one select a single pixel? I do that a quite a bit when I do retouching. But I'm thinking one prolly has to zoom in quite closely inorder to do so. Zooming in and out and select and reselect is too much of a handywork for me, and I'm not that coordinated. bleh!

Nice invention tho.
posted by mrhappysad at 3:19 PM on October 8, 2005

Be great to use something like this in conjunction with a Wacom tablet - have them both running at the same time to combine the hand use with the stylus. I'd like to see this working with Photoshop and Painter, of course.

However, what I really want is a 30x42 drawing board which is a flat-panel e-ink touch display to combine all the functions of the Wacom tablet, this hand thing and the monitor into one drawing surface. Basically a surface where I could grab a piece of virtual paper with my hand, and then draw on it with the stylus while moving and rotating and zooming the page with either or both hands.

Combine this device, with its tactical feedback, with the Wacom-type drawing tools and a big old flat display, and that would pretty much be heaven for me and a lot of other digital artists!

In the meantime I'm probably just gonna buy a Toshiba M200.

This is neat stuff, very promising.
posted by zoogleplex at 4:04 PM on October 8, 2005

Monitor overlay (accurate) drawing tablets have been around a while, but weren't cheap.
posted by HTuttle at 4:25 PM on October 8, 2005

The lemur tablet/screen mentioned upthread is mostly for manipulating sliders, buttons, and two-variable grids -- basically a customizable midi interface.

The Lemur uses Open Sound Control which is significantly faster and more dynamic and flexible than MIDI. It allows for a far higher resolution than 0-127.
posted by hampton at 7:33 PM on October 8, 2005

another neat multi-touch interface
posted by arialblack at 8:12 PM on October 8, 2005

And still another. (MPEG here.)
posted by Ironwolf at 8:57 PM on October 8, 2005

How come nobody is noticing that this thing is basically completely retarded, since you could have an actually touchable screen with the exact same abilities, today? The ONLY thing this tablet is adding seems to be multi-touch and this "shadow hands" thing, which is useless since with a real touchable screen you could see your real hands, without the delay, artifacts, and framerate problems that obviously plagued this thing (I know - it's not at market yet but still).

This "invention" is totally redundant, sorry. I'm not usually a naysayer but this thing is ridiculous. Compared with the actual pixel-precision of laser mice, which also allow a single hand to do multiple tasks (how do you right click with this hand thing?), this is a step backwards.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 1:19 AM on October 9, 2005

arialblack: another neat multi-touch interface

zoogleplex: However, what I really want is a 30x42 drawing board which is a flat-panel e-ink touch display to combine all the functions of the Wacom tablet, this hand thing and the monitor into one drawing surface. Basically a surface where I could grab a piece of virtual paper with my hand, and then draw on it with the stylus while moving and rotating and zooming the page with either or both hands.

I'm with BlackLeotardFront. This particular device is fairly generic- it's a Wacom tablet with a slightly more sophisticated driver. What zoogleplex really wants is the cool computer that Tom Cruise used in the beginning of Minority Report: the display is the interface!

I've seen exactly just such a thing, it's not expensive at all, and it works amazingly well, rock solid and smooth. Simply move your hands around in the air in front of the display like a conductor, or directly touch the display if you prefer with hands and fingers, zooming in and out and manipulating objects and items with incredible ease, and with response times equal to any mouse. Or you can use physical objects, including dry paintbrushes or styluses, dragging them across the display much like you might a canvas or sketchpad, and it understands the action as well as any Wacom tablet. Heck, it was so sophisticated, you could hold a magazine up in front of it, and it could view the image through the display itself, and capture the image instantly for you to then manipulate and play with however you wanted. Simply. Fucking. Amazing.

Quite simply the coolest technology I've seen in years, and when I saw it months ago it was already in a state that was shippable. The inventors of it are inexplicably sitting on it for at least another year. I think they're worried that there might not be enough of a software market for the product to justify a release sooner, before getting partners lined up, which I'll never understand: the geek set along would buy the thing right now, and obviously plenty of graphic designers would jump on even a version 1.0 today for the sheer coolness factor. The user base for this device would explode, and innovate the software easily as fast as anything we saw with Google Maps.

I'm basically dying for them to finally release it, because I'll be among the very first to buy it.
posted by hincandenza at 3:00 AM on October 9, 2005

Wacom tablets and touch screens don't have tactile feedback, do they? The problem with touch screens is exactly that you can't see through your hands, and you're not quite sure what you're pointing at, because the thing is under your finger. With this device, you can feel where the objects on the screen are. This is simply something that current tablets and touch screens do not provide.
posted by ikalliom at 4:12 AM on October 9, 2005

Anyone else find it strange that 90% of the video focused on things you can do with any touch interface (and any drawing program)? The two-point object manipulation was cool, and the view scaling and rotation was ubercool, but these are things that could be done much more cheaply with a dual mouse setup. Which raises the question: why the hell can't I have a dual mouse setup?
posted by squidlarkin at 7:53 AM on October 9, 2005