Interactive Displays: Natural Human-Interface Technologies

Series Editor's Foreword

The interactive use of machines by humans goes back thousands of years. Possibly the first vending machine was invented by Philo of Byzantium in 220 BCE. By the insertion of a coin, it would deliver a measured quantity of soap to a washstand. This was a mechanical device with an escapement movement. It was an advanced machine, certainly state of the art, but whether it had a perceptible influence on the behavioural development of society is debatable.

Moving forward more than 2200 years, we find ourselves in a markedly different situation. Just 50 years ago the first capacitive touch screen was reported. It took a further 30 years to become sufficiently developed to enter the high-end commercial market in laptop computers, point-of-sale terminals and the suchlike and hand held consumer devices. After another decade the present explosion in touch enabled devices began, at least for hand held devices, its march to ubiquity.

That is the effective starting point for this latest addition to the Wiley-SID Series in Display Technology. Written by a highly qualified group of experts in their various fields, the book covers the major means of interaction: touch, voice and vision. The first two of these are discussed in a single chapter each and vision in the next five, which reflects on the disparate nature of available or soon to be available vision technologies. There follow two chapters which present different ways in which multiple methods can be used to ...