NanoTouch

Patrick Baudisch of Microsoft Research has been working on back-of-the-screen touch services for a while now. His work in this area was first brought to the attention of the public when he introduced the LucidTouch, which was featured on Engaget in 2007. After some experimentation Baudisch has determined that LucidTouch works better on very tinny screens where the fingers occlude the visual while interacting.

This year Baudisch introduced NanoTouch which allows you to interact with a very tinny screen though back-of-the-screen touch input. NewScientist has a great story and video of the prototype NanoTouch device.

The idea is really cool and has lots of possible applciations including watches which are tinny but useful general purpose computers. Also its not hard to imainge Apple using this technology in its nano iPods some day.

Patrick Baudisch is a prolific inventor who started his career at legndary Xerox Park research center. You can see his other multi-touch and interaction research here. Baudisch provides design guidelines for NanoTouch here (PDF).