It feels hot!

The future will see a seamless interaction among everything in any ambient. Of course, part of this interaction will see ourselves as one of the interacting party and objects as the other.
The technical challenge is how to make this interaction possible in a seamless and affordable way (very low cost) taking into account the variety of objects.
It is clearly easy to support interaction with a computer, but it may be trickier to support interaction with a wall, with an apple, with a whole ambient.
This is where the research carried out at an augment reality company, Metaio, comes handy. 
They are working on a new approach to identify where you place your finger on an object. They call it Thermal Touch, and with a reason. They are using the thermal signature left by a warmer object, like your finger, on a colder one. The flow of heat from the warmer surface to the colder one leaves a warmer spot on the the object and this spot can be identified using a thermal camera. An additional camera, operating in the visible light, provides the image of the object that is processed by an image recognition software to map the information coming from the thermal camera onto the actual object surface.
The two cameras are bundled into a single device, Optris PI200. Although today this is packaged as a separate device (and it is somewhat bulky) in the near future this approach can found an implementation that will basically become embedded in a variety of devices, including Google Glass. Wherever you have today a digital camera you can well see it becoming coupled in the future with a thermal detector and along with the appropriate software this can result in a seamless detection of where your finger is touching an object, hence the starting point for the interaction.

About Roberto Saracco

Roberto Saracco fell in love with technology and its implications long time ago. His background is in math and computer science. Until April 2017 he led the EIT Digital Italian Node and then was head of the Industrial Doctoral School of EIT Digital up to September 2018. Previously, up to December 2011 he was the Director of the Telecom Italia Future Centre in Venice, looking at the interplay of technology evolution, economics and society. At the turn of the century he led a World Bank-Infodev project to stimulate entrepreneurship in Latin America. He is a senior member of IEEE where he leads the New Initiative Committee and co-chairs the Digital Reality Initiative. He is a member of the IEEE in 2050 Ad Hoc Committee. He teaches a Master course on Technology Forecasting and Market impact at the University of Trento. He has published over 100 papers in journals and magazines and 14 books.