This year the institute received three R & D 100 awards, the self-proclaimed “Oscars of Innovation,” for its technologies. One was for a design that boosts magnetic forces in a motor and a second was for innovations in regulating genes in micro-organisms. It has its hands in a lot of pots.
The vision…at some point: On Tuesday a teamfrom ITRI stopped by on their way to Orlando to receive the awards and showed off the third winner, the i-Touch-in-Air, a very early stage eyeware that generates interactive screens, like in the movie Minority Report, right in the lens of the glasses. People standing around you don’t know what you’re seeing unless they look closely at the lenses (which, yes, is different than the movie where the screens were on the wall).
To navigate the screens, you wave and point and swipe your fingers in the air. Perched atop the glass are sensors that figure out what you’re trying to do. Fingers need to be about 20 centimeters from the sensors or your cursor — a red outline of your finger — starts to go haywire.
When I used the very basic drawing program, I could barely manage a straight line. Of course I would need more practice but even the ITRI’s rep had issues. He did, however, pull off dialing my number in thin air and getting Skype to call my phone.
Like just about every other piece of computerized eyeware, these look ridiculous (seriously, look at those pictures). A huge cable bursts from the top of the glasses to connect with the PC, suddenly strange in today’s world of wireless communication. The sensors on top of the lenses looked like they should shoot laser beams. And the bridge of my nose was sore for 20 minutes after I took them off.
But, again, ITRI isn’t working for the aesthetic. That, they’ll leave up to whatever company licenses the product.
There were features that informed the future. The “defined distance with defined range” (DDDR) camera, as ITRI calls it, picked up the motions of my fingertips. I didn’t need any sort of specialized glove.
Google Glass has brought the dialogue of computerized eyeglasses into the mainstream, yet ITRI is the kind of background entity we forget about in the background. ITRI hopes i-Touch-in-Air will eventually be licensed in consumer products, but sees the interactive tech in more complicated procedures like endoscopic surgery — not as much for controlling surgical instruments (yet?) but for delivering important data right into the surgeons’ glasses.
No matter where it ends up, it’s always fun to get a little flavor of the future.
