This newest version is very much like the regular 24HD that came before it, but now Wacom has added gesture control and multi-touch features to the mix for the 24HD Touch. They’re also promising an improved 24-inch display with 1.07 billion colors, covering 97% of Adobe’s RGB gamut. There’s also RGB backlighting for even better color rendition.

“Increasingly, as creative software incorporates multi-touch interaction and gesture support, the Cintiq 24HD touch provides a natural input experience for all related activities including concept sketching, illustration and especially 3D activities such as sculpting, modeling and animation,” says Professional Products Brand Director Don Varga. “The ability to manipulate a 3D model or pan, zoom and rotate an image with one hand while simultaneously sculpting or sketching with the other delivers a completely natural experience enabling artists to stay completely in their creative zone.”

Be expected to pay a pretty penny for all of this though. The Wacom Cintiq 24HD Touch will retail for $3699 when it ships this August, a full $1100 more than its predecessor.

[Source]

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Microsoft’s Surface table certainly isn’t the only multi-touch table-styled LCD technology out there, as further proven by the new MultiTouch 55-inch Cell MT550W7 display that will be demonstrated at CES from Tuesday through Friday this week.

The demonstrations will include both the released product running Windows 7 embedded, and a prototype of the Windows 8 Developer Preview experience on the giant table display. An actual upgrade path to Windows 8 will exist sometime later in 2012.

The MT550W7 runs on an Intel Core i7 processor, and is four inches deep on the sides and eight inches deep in the middle. The real amazing part of the technology though, is that it has an unlimited number of touch points on the display.

This massive table-like PC will include support for industry’s widest range of development tools such as MultiTouch Cornerstone software development kit, and Microsoft’s Surface 2 SDK, and all TUIO-compatible tools. An external computer with Windows, Linux, or Mac OS can also be used to connect multiple cells into even-larger installations actually.

Such technology will ultimately be most useful in places like museums, retail locations, and perhaps even trendy restaurants and bars. Of course such technology doesn’t come at a very low price, though specifics regarding the actual retail price have yet to be released.

[ source ]

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Those of you who are a bit tired of using your finger on usual glass touchscreens might be interested in this new project. Bruno Zamborlin’s Mogees or “mosaicing gestural surface” appears to be paving the way for a new touch interface technology for the future.

The idea is very simple – “real time gesture recognition with contact microphones”. By utilizing a contact microphone and complex audio processing software, Zamborlin and his team have showed that it is possible to determine the placement and direction of gestures on any surface, including a balloon.

Mogees receives input from the stethoscope-like contact microphone that you see above and analyzes it for recognizing gesture.

That contact microphone actually contains multiple microphones which will help to create a stereo image of the sounds it hears. The vibrations that are made with your fingers on a surface are analyzed and converted into gestures on a PC connected to the microphone via that black cable. These gestures are converted into sounds using MaxMSP, which is a visual programming language for creating music and other multimedia stuff.

The researchers haven’t given out any details regarding possible applications for Mogees. But it is always fun to imagine, right?

What if you could keep your handset in your pocket and you could just tap your leg to answer a call? Imagine scrolling down a webpage on your laptop by touching your finger on the table. Taking gestures off of the device and moving them into its vicinity seems to be a whole lot fun. Maybe all those will be part of our future.

Check out Bruno Zamborlin’s blog here and check out the video to know more about Morgees.

The post Advanced Microphone Technology Transforms Any Surface to Multitouch appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

The first generation Microsoft Surface seemed like such a novel product, but it didn’t quite get as widespread an adoption rate as some folks may have hoped. Well, the second Surface is now available for pre-order in over 23 countries and it brings some fun innovations to the table (terrible pun intended).

The Microsoft Surface 2 was a joint project with Samsung and it bears the model name SUR40. The fundamental concept is the same: it’s a table with a giant touchscreen on it and this touchscreen can recognize certain objects that are placed on it. However, much like the move in tablets and smartphones, the Surface 2 SUR40 is significantly slimmer and sleeker than its predecessor.

Rather than having a bulky pedestal to house its internals, as was the case with the original, the Surface 2 is able to get all of its components integrated into the 40-inch multitouch display. They used Microsoft’s PixelSense technology to slim things down, getting rid of the five camera array in the first Surface. The new Surface can track up to 50 touch points at the same time.

The release date hasn’t been announced yet, but they’re pegging the price at right around $8,400.

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Samsung has released a commercial showing off their new 5.3-inch smartphone? tablet? They aren’t even sure what it is. Regardless, the screen is massive and the battery may be terrible, but its too soon to tell. The Galaxy Note will have a HSPA+ quad band and 4G LTE, EDGE/GPRS quad band modem, a dual core 1.4Ghz processor, but still stuck on Gingerbread.

Back to the 5.3” WXGA display. Samsung makes some really nice displays, and this one will be capable of 1280 x 800 at 285 PPI. Oh ya, it’s an HD Super AMOLED too. Check out the video with the S Pen in action.

[Samsung]

The post Video: Samsung Galaxy Note With S Pen appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Because we never use the same part of our finger when we play with our touchscreens, some researchers have developed a way to enhance the interaction options by simply adding a microphone to the screen.

Carnegie Mellon Universities have found a way to distinguish between the tap of a fingertip, the pad of the finger, a fingernail and a knuckle. What’s the use of it, you ask? Well, TapSense makes it possible for making room for more content on the screens, because by using another side of your finger you could switch between functions.

For example, you could switch to capitalized letter by using a fingernail instead of a finger tip, or switch to numerals, rather than toggling a different set of keys.

The way it tells the difference between the part of your finger is by classifying the sounds they make when they touch the screen. So, an inexpensive microphone could turn your device into a – literally – multitouch screen, as they say the mics already built in the phones aren’t designed for capturing the sounds TapSense needs.

The post TapSense TouchScreen Technology Distinguishes Between Different Finger Parts appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

During that deal, Apple made prepayments to several suppliers, stating they felt flash memory would be a large part of the future. The arrangement first lead to flash memory in iPods, then all iOS devices, and more recently their MacBook and iMac lines.

What their investments are this time may only be known to company insiders, but I stand by my prediction that the touchscreen is heading to the next generation of iMacs, MacBook Airs and Pros. Looking back to the 15″ to 32″ Touch Revolution conducive multitouch screens revealed at CES, it’s promising. Add to that the teaser for Mac OS X Lion: “…we took our best thinking from the iPhone and brought it to iPad. And now we’re bringing it all back to the Mac.” The OS update’s slogan “The power of Mac OS X. The magic of iPad” almost says enough on its own. Not to mention the patents from last August.

Touch Revolution is a B2B company, meaning they market their massive touch screens to other businesses who can incorporate them into their own technologies, but can they satiate Apple’s demand?

What can I say. I’m convinced.

[Apple, iPod NN]

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Tablets have become a pretty big deal and Google Android is featuring prominently on this front. Capitalizing on this rising trend is N-trig. They’ve now adapted the DuoSense technology over to the Android platform and we should start seeing the tech implemented in Android tablets early next year.

What is DuoSense? From what I can gather, the tech combines a digitizer pen (like the one you would use with a Wacom graphics tablet) with multi-touch capabilities. We all know that these pen-based solutions are more accurate than our chubby fingers, but rarely do you find pens and multi-touch going on at the same time.

The idea, then, is to use the N-trig hardware to open “up new windows of opportunity for the Android pen community to utilize the N-trig Digital Pencil to expand functionality from traditional media consumption and create pen-based applications for more precise and creative on-screen user interaction.” I guess you could start drawing up your own webcomics on your tablet, rather than just reading them.

The press release doesn’t make mention of any specific hardware partners, but it does indicate that the N-trig DuoSense solution will be “integrated in a number of Android slates due to be launched in 2011.”

In an interview with Mobilized, N-trig VP Gary Baum says N-trig technology adds about $50 to the cost of the device. Which could make a budget version of the Wacom Cintiq line of LCD tablets. Adding pressure sensitivity and sub-pixel accuracy to a device like the iPad would change alot of things, but the average user wouldn’t see the benefits themselves. The Cintiq brings users 2048 levels of pressure sensitivity, while the 256 levels of pressure sensitivity in DuoSense would be more along the lines of a Windows Tablet.

But in the end it will allow them to stand out in the crowd of Android tablets flooding the market to look more like a Windows tablet.

[Mobilized via PR, N-trig]

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Part of the over-abundance in paper documents could easily be attributed to Xerox, and like any real problem its solution ought to be exploited for profit. Enter the Xerox “smart document” touchscreen tabletop display.

With this very slick document review system, users can literally have millions of documents at their fingertips with the power to find, open, categorize, move and sort through these documents virtually in a fraction of the time it would take to do with physical documents.

Xerox knows there is a market of professionals that sift through millions of documents yearly; which is why early prototypes are with legal and medical professions. They’ve already had success marketing the CategoriX product to these fields, and now have built this new system based on that technology.

CategoriX can be extremely effective in categorizing relevant documents. By pointing to a few relevant documents the system learns what you are looking for and can provide similar matches, cutting down the man hours to pour through millions of documents from weeks to hours.

“When you consider the vast number of documents involved in litigation, patent searching, government security and intelligence analyst reports, it’s easy to understand how some review efforts involve millions of documents,” said Caroline Privault, project leader at the research center.  “We believe that a tool like this will have a major impact on the cost, accuracy and speed of document review.

The post Xerox gets intuitive with Smart Document Review multitouch surface device appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Samsung's patent shows a front and back screen being manipulated by touch commands

We’ve been inundated with the iPad and its multitouch capabilities. It has made for a slew of apps utilizing the technology, and now, we are to prepare for the next-generation of tablet computing – a future of double touchscreens, one on the front, and one on the back.

The patent filed with the USPTO describes a “Mobile terminal having dual touch screen and method of controlling content therein”. It’s unclear whether content will be displayed on both screens, but from the sounds of the patent the rear screen function to detect touch events for whatever applications will utilize such features.

We are expecting a Galaxy android tablet, and since this device is still a ways away, the double touch patent could be for future designs to come. Or perhaps not at all.

The New Scientist video below shows a similar technology prototype in use.

UnWired Review via Electronista

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