Multitoe interaction: bringing multi-touch to interactive floors

Multitoe, a research project being developed by a team of people working at the human interaction lab of Professor Patrick Baudisch of the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, is a multitouch floor that recognizes individual users by their shoe pattern and responds to such universally familiar actions as stomping your feet and tapping your toes. The display ensures endless possibilities in both space and experience for users, all without sacrificing direct touch which is often essential to usability.  The floor allows such high-precision interaction that users can even type with their foot on a QWERTY keyboard.


According to the team behind Multitoe:
“Tabletop computers cannot become larger than arm’s length without giving up direct touch. This prevents tabletop applications from dealing with more than a few dozen on-screen objects. We propose direct touch surfaces that are orders of magnitude larger by integrating high-resolution multi-touch into back-projected floors, while maintaining the purpose and interaction concepts of tabletop, i.e., direct manipulation. “