Let’s say you wound up face to face with the first touch screen you have ever seen. You’ve heard of these miraculous devices, but have yet had the chance to actually examine one up close. No one else around you seems to be paying attention to it or you, so you do the only natural, humanly thing: you touch it…and again…and over and over again. You clown around with it for an amount of time inversely proportional to how much the people around you start to notice your excitement.

Although not all of us react in the same way the first time we meet up with one of these devices, we can all relate to the same universal truth: they amaze, amuse or baffle all of us. Which one of us hasn’t spent at least a few minutes interacting with such a marvelous thing? And why shouldn’t we? That is its purpose, after all: to interact with us, by either giving us useful information or helping us kill waiting time. But all these years it’s had its one major drawback: it can only recognize one touch at a time. However, New York University has finished developing a new, tasty treat for all of us: the first practical multiple-touch screen (MTS).

Now, if you’ve noticed me using the term practical, it’s because there was a much simpler, yet more expensive way 2 build the MTS, but would you have preferred paying for a multitude of sensors covering the whole underside of the screen? I think not! And why should you, when all it takes is a light-sensitive video camera, which helps keep track of all the points of the screen that have been touched? Of course, there is a lot more to it than that, but this is the simplified general idea behind the project. Naturally, there’s still a small waiting period before this innovation will hit the streets, but when it does, be sure to see a lot more people gathering around it to admire it. That is, of course, if you’re not one of them already.

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