14 DAY TRIAL // If you own a tablet with a compact form factor, you might have found yourself wishing the screen could accommodate more extensive lengthy swiping gestures.
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania claim that with the help of a few cheap sound sensor, any table or desk could be turned into an extension of your tablet’s screen.
The team has assembled a system that they candidly call Toffee, which takes advantage of inexpensive mini microphones that is attached to each corner of a tablet.
What these sensors are actually doing is listen to the sounds you make as you swipe and tap around the tablet. In turn, they will find correspondents to what you were doing before, like swiping through your image gallery or playing a game.
The system is pretty intelligent and is capable of figuring out the origin of the sound by calculating how long it takes for the sound wave to arrive.
The technique has been used in military sonar before and is known as “passive time-difference-of-arrival,” but it’s the first time the system gets implemented in a consumer product such as the tablet.
A big advantage is that the technology is very inexpensive, as microphones tend to be quite cheap, so there's no reason why future products not to take advantage of such a function.