Disney unveils Touché, a new generation of tactile experiences

A team of researchers from Disney and the universities of Tokyo and Carnegie Mellon have created a curious system based on a technology called capacitive sensing frequency sweep that allows interaction with tactile touches, no longer only on surfaces such as screens, but practically any surface.

Disney, through his research area, has just presented a new technology that is quite surprising and can revolutionize the world of touch interaction. Its name is Touché and it is based on the same idea as the touch screens that we already know., como trackpads o smartphones, but instead of operating on a single frequency, detects a whole range that increases information on how the object is being touched, which they call capacitive sensing frequency sweep (SFC), that allows us to determine not only that something is being touched, but also in what way, How many touch points are touching it and what is it being touched with?.

This allows you to distinguish when you are touching something with a finger., with two, with six, with the elbow or with the nose. It also allows you to recognize that you are touching a liquid or a door handle., all variables within the reach of a programmer to create actions dependent on being touched. With this new technique, the complex configuration of the hands and the human body begins to be recognized and the great variety of actions that can be performed on other objects such as: "do not touch, tap, pinch or grab. This contextual information significantly improves touch interaction in a wide range of applications., from conventional touch screens, to singular contexts such as the surface of the human body itself and surprisingly, liquid materials, adding the sense of touch and gestural sensitivity.

Any surface

The research team has explained that “Touché is a new detection technology that proposes a new Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing technique that can not only detect a touch, but also can simultaneously recognize complex configurations of the human hand and body during touch interaction. To a large extent, instrumenting objects and materials with tactile sensitivity is easy and simple: A single cable is enough to make objects and environments sensitive to gesture and touch”.

The researchers in charge of the project are Ivan Poupyrev, from Disney Research, Munehiko Sato, from the University of Tokyo and Harrison Chris, from HCII at Carnegie Mellon University. So far, the various experiments that have been carried out in five different application domains attribute accuracy in the classification of gestures of the 99%.

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