Ricardo Sato

At its core,the concept of Tangible Interfaces leverages the idea of using the movement of the body as an inherent part of the human side of a human-computer interaction, assuming that bodily engagement and tactile manipulation can facilitate deeper understanding and more intuitive experiences. However,as an interaction principle in our era of digital design,motion construction and control has been underutilized as a design tool,leaving open the possibilities of motion's natural ability to draw our attention,provide physical feedback,and convey information through physical change. This dissertation postulates that the ability to experiment,prototype,and model with programmable kinetic forms is becoming increasingly important as digital technology becomes more readily embedded in our objects and environments. The need for tools and systems with which to create, manipulate, and finesse physical motion in response to computational and material input remains an under-developed design area.

SiMa Systems is a pioneer of Multi-Touch and Multi-Force (MT/MF) touch sensor technologies. SiMa’s resistive MT/MF touch technologies have unique functional characteristics enabling a new dimension of touch, gesture and pen input. Resolution of up to 20 points/mm affords uncompromised accuracy even for the most demanding applications. SiMa’s touch technologies can be integrated into a broad range of products from displays to touch pads.

On MacBook Air and recent MacBook Pro systems, Adobe Photoshop CS4 reads multitouch gestures to rotate of the document canvas. But it's easy to accidentally rotate the canvas on newer trackpads.

Internally, our devs have created several different physics simulators based on the applications they are working on which always seem to make adults giddy as schoolkids.

If you're remotely like me, you'll also like what Dave Brown has created. Dave works in the UK at one of our Microsoft Technology Centers. His job is to create proof of concepts for organizations working with Microsoft products. He's also a part time wizard. Seriously. Not only is the simulator crazy fun, I'm told his code is very elegant as well.