If you stop and really think about it, the touch screens that adorn most of our gadgets these days are pretty amazing. But could they get even better? The folks at Disney Research think so, and to prove it they’ve come up with Touché, a touch and gesture sensing technology that could dramatically improve the way we interact with everything around us.

At its most basic, Touché could be used to enhance touchscreen devices like smartphones — but it could also turn everyday objects such as doorknobs, tables, liquids, or even your own body, into touch interfaces

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Touché uses the same capacitive sensing technology found in smartphone and tablet touchscreens, but Disney has effectively supercharged it.Standard touch screens can only sense in a binary manner: they can tell whether they are being touched or not. Touché is far more reactive and can sense different types of touch.

Disney calls a “capacitive profile.” Touching an object with one finger creates a certain capacitive profile, while two fingers (or a grasp, or a flat palm) creates different profiles. The best way to understand this approach is to watch the video at the end of the story (and take a look at the graph above).

In the video below, Touché accurately and quickly detects gestures on objects as disparate as a doorknob, table, and water in a fish tank.

Read more at Disney Research