Metaio, an augmented reality company is demoing a new possible future “Thermal Touch” for input control of wearable technologies were augmented reality plays a major role. Touching physical buttons, voice commands, and depth-aware gestures are used for input controls in the computing side bridging the hardware and software gap. However most of these are bizarre, say swiping in the air or voice commands amidst a cafe makes a buffoon of ourself.
This German company Metaio, has used an evolutionary path in the input commands likely very comfortable.This technology combines Infrared and Visible light cameras to detect the heat signatures from our fingers and literally turn anything around us into a touch screen.
As for prototype,the device has been made with a webcam attached to a Tablet PC.
The touch of humans leaves a thermal print behind, the technology combines that with augmented reality.If this is said to likely be the future you can enter a supermarket, and just by touching the product you may get the user-reviews or the ingredients used or even use to check the calories you would consume.
Metaio thinks that this technology is still approximately five years away from hitting the market,but that doesn’t stop them from preparing prototypes. Metaio says it will demonstrate a prototype on May 27-29 at the Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, California.
A video featuring the prototype and the conceptual idea: