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AirTouch Panels Means No More Dirty Touchscreens!

I've never been particularly terrified of dirty touchscreens, but now that I carry hand sanitizer in my car I guess I must be more concerned. Anyway, technology to the Rescue!

As the coronavirus pandemic persists, we’re beginning to face a new normal where we all stay two meters (or six feet) apart, avoid touching things, and avoid crowded places....

One new method that restaurants, libraries, doctors’ offices, and many other public places may soon use to combat coronavirus is exchanging physical touch screens for holographic ones. You know, like the kind you’d see in sci-fi films? They hover in the air and respond to your touch, so you can swipe and tap to operate the “screen”.

The new Air Touch Panel, developed by Hakuhodo Product’s, Inc. may not be quite as fancy or advanced as what Tom Cruise used in Minority Report, but it’s still a pretty cool piece of technology. It makes use of the Parity Mirror 300, a special panel produced by Japanese company Parity Innovations that uses geometrical optics to form an image of light beams in the air. However, instead of being holographic or faintly translucent, the Air Touch Panel’s air screen looks solid from any angle and at any distance. A motion sensor in the machine tracks the movement of your hands and fingers, or even a touch pen, and a small-scale computer processes the movement and operates the screen.

(Via SoraNews24)

Fans of Frederik Pohl and his amazing 1966 novel The Age of the Pussyfoot can put down their hand sanitizer and make use of the virtual keyboard:

His hands flashed over the keyboard - it had not been there a moment before, but it was operative...

This may be the answer to my 2008 question Where's My Hand Waving Gesture Recognition Interface?, full of popular film references to this idea.

Thanks of course to Winchell Chung!

Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 7/17/2020)

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