Video: Sensitive floor
IMAGINE entering your living room and sliding your foot purposefully over a particular stretch of floor. Your hi-fi system springs to life, pumping out the sounds of your current favourite CD.
While touchscreens are close to ubiquitous in portable electronic gadgets, touch sensitive floors have barely got off the ground. That could be about to change thanks to the development of a 鈥渢ouch floor鈥� by and colleagues at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany.
The group鈥檚 prototype, named , is made up of a 0.5-millimetre-thick sheet of silicone lying on an 8-millimetre-thick layer of clear acrylic, both of which sit on a thick glass sheet to provide rigidity.
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Light beams shone into the acrylic bounce around inside until pressure from a foot, say, allows them to escape. A camera below captures the light and registers an image of whatever has pressed down on the floor.
Forms of this technique, known as , are already in use in some touchscreens, but Baudisch鈥檚 version expands the idea by allowing the identification of individual users from the pattern on the tread of their shoes.
鈥淲hat is also cool is that FTIR allows for pressure sensing,鈥� says Baudisch. 鈥淭he harder you press the silicone against the acrylic, the more light comes out.鈥�
Baudisch has already adapted Multi-toe for the video game Unreal Tournament, with the screen projected on the ground and players able to move a character by leaning forwards, backwards and from side to side. They can shoot by tapping their toes. Tests have also shown users can use their feet to press keys measuring around 5 by 6 centimetres on a virtual keyboard.
The potential for the system to be used as a gaming interface has been demonstrated by the hugely successful Wii Fit video game, which uses Nintendo鈥檚 pressure-sensitive , on which users stand .
Despite the success of Wii Fit, 鈥渋nteraction via the feet has been greatly neglected,鈥� says at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He adds that Multi-toe is impressive but that the system cannot easily be used on existing floors because of the need for underfloor cavities to house the cameras. Baudisch says future versions will address this issue.
Multi-toe was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery in Atlanta, Georgia, this week.
