5 futuristic interfaces

If tech related conferences are good for one thing it is to show of ideas and concepts that we probably won’t ever see. While many ideas may work well in labs and during controlled presentations getting them into the wild in the hands of those terrible things called consumers usually happens only in the rarest of cases.

A good example of this is the following five futuristic type interfaces that will be presented at this year’s ACM’s Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques – otherwise known as SIGGRAPH 2009 – which is taking place in New Orleans this week.

Touchable Holography

Researchers, led by Hiroyuki Shinoda, from the University of Tokyo have developed a display that lets users touch objects that appear to float in space. This trick is done using and LCD and a concave mirror and the sensation of touch is recreated using an ultrasound device positioned below the mirror and LCD.

Augmented Reality for Ordinary Toys

Frantz Lasorne, a student at L’École de Design in France, and his Scope display automatically recognizes ordinary toys that have been mounted onto platforms covered with hexagonal patterns. The idea being that when viewed through the augmented reality display those patterns become interactive buttons and can be used to make modifications to the toys.

3D Teleconferencing

University of Southern California researchers will be demoing Headspin which is supposed to be a 3D teleconferencing system that maintains eye contact between a three-dimensional head and several participants on the other end of a connection.

HeadSPIN: A One-to-Many 3D Video Teleconferencing System from MxR on Vimeo.

Scratchable Input

Carnegie Mellon University researcher Chris Harrison will be demoing a system that can turn any surface into an instant input device by sensing the unique sound produced when a fingernail is dragged across it.

hat tip to Technology Review