Two-Sided Touch Screen

A pseudo-transparent screen from Microsoft and Mitsubishi lets people enter data from both sides of a handheld device.



Researchers at Microsoft and Mitsubishi are developing a new touch-screen system that lets people type text, click hyperlinks, and navigate maps from both the front and back of a portable device. A semitransparent image of the fingers touching the back of the device is superimposed on the front so that users can see what they're touching.

The current prototype, which illustrates a concept that the researchers call LucidTouch, is "hacked together" from existing products, says Daniel Wigdor, a researcher at Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab and a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. The team started with a seven-inch, commercial, single-input touch screen. To the back of the screen, they glued a touch pad capable of detecting multiple inputs. "This allowed us to have a screen on the front and a gesture pad [on the back] that could have multiple points," says Wigdor. "But what that didn't give us was the ability to see the hands." So, he says, the researchers added a boom with a Web camera to the back of the gadget.

The image from the Web camera and the touch information from the gesture pad are processed by software running on a desktop computer, to which the prototype is connected. The software subtracts the background from the image of the hands, Wigdor explains, and flips it around so that the superimposed image is in the same position as the user's hands. Additionally, pointers are added to the fingers so that a user can precisely select targets on the touch pad that might be smaller than her finger. In October, a paper describing the research will be presented at the User Interface Software and Technology symposium in Rhode Island.

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