Touch screen interfaces didn’t even come to their full potential and researchers are working already on the next step after touch screens, which is gestural interfaces where all you have to do is move your hard in front of the screen and those movements are then interpreted by the computer inside the display and translated into commands.

    It’s like what you’ve already seen in Minority Report, but at a new level that doesn’t require any kind of gloves or tracking device on your hand and it will be also pretty inexpensive so you could embed it into any display, even thin ones.

    Gestural interface

    Gestural interface

    The principle is simple, you have an array of sensors behind the screen (sensors like in digital cameras) which receive light when LCD pixels swith off and act like a lens or from permanent switched off pixels. Every sensor from the array can ‘see’ you hard and because there are a few hundred pictures of your position at one time, each differing slightly from the one captured by sensors in proximity depth of field can be computed this the gestural display will have a 3D image of your hard.

    This kind of technology is still in research and development phase, but there are working prototypes like the one in the short video below. It’s really an amazing technology that I hope will hit market in a few years. After all we’ll getting rid of the only think I don’t like about touch screens: the need to touch the screen and leave marks on it, be it sweat, dust or plain fingerprints. [source]