$5 Sensor Turns LCD Monitors Into Touchscreens

[wraggster]

Researchers at the University of Washington's aptly named Ubiquitous Computing Lab can turn any LCD monitor in your house into a touchscreen, with nothing more than a $5 sensor that plugs into the wall (http://www.extremetech.com/computing/154258-turning-a-standard-lcd-monitor-into-touchscreen-with-a-5-wall-mounted-sensor) and some clever software."The system works by measuring changes that your hand creates in the electromagnetic signature of the monitor. Surprisingly, it offers some pretty fine-grained detection, too: "full-hand touch, five-finger touch, hovering above the screen, pushing, and pulling." The "$5 sensor" part is mostly theoretical for now to those of us who don't live in a lab, though; on the other hand, "co-author Sidhant Gupta tells Technology Review that the $5 sensor uses off-the-shelf parts, and the algorithms are included in the paper, so it would be fairly easy for you — or a commercial entity — to recreate the uTouch system.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/04/26/1619230/5-sensor-turns-lcd-monitors-into-touchscreens