From the same guy who created OmniTouch, which allows any surface to be used as a touchscreen, comes TapSense, which can tell what is touching its display, e.g. fingernail, finger pad, knuckle, fingertip.
While this is really cool from a technology perspective, it further complicates the usability issues wrapped up with the diversity of multitouch environments.
Here’s to hoping all this innovation gets distilled into something useful for users that works with their existing knowledge of multitouch and not against it.
Perhaps this technology could instead be used for a medical application that is dependent upon the body part that is presented to it. (“Please turn your finger around. We do not want to prick your fingernail to take a blood sample.”)
Interesting application. I’m sure there are good use cases; what’s clear for sure is that touch is a brave new world for interaction, and standardizing is and will be lacking for a while, much to the detriment of users.