Multi touch interface: Planning

 

When I watched the Jeff Han’s multi touch video a year ago, I got impressed  with that technology and I was researching about it. In fact, this is a not so new technology, and is really simple.

There are tons of geeks all over the world building their own multi touch displays, and researching how to improve them, and nowadays these home made prototypes are as good as any kind of comercial device.

I’m planning to build my own prototype. As a coder, I have an special interest about this technology and how to develop applications for it.

When I decided to start this projects, first of all I had to choose the technology to use on my interface. There are two main approachs to develop a home made multi touch interface. Both of them are similar, but the construction are totally diferent:

FTIR (Frustrated Total Internal Reflection):

This first method is the most used, perhaps because is the method used by Jeff Han, and it did famous this technology.

With this method, we use an acrylic panel and flood it with IR light from the borders. We use acrylic and not glass, because acrylic has a good transmittance for IR, while glass will not work.

 

DI (Diffused Illumination):