Red Herring recently published a story about Apple’s new touch-free patent application. This is believed to be the revolutionary technology shipping with next generation iPod devices (and most likely several other mobile devices will adopt similar solutions in future). Touch-free technology has lots of possibilities for mobile device user interfaces, and with this article I’m going to shortly cover some of background of touch-free technology.

In short, touch-free technologies are based an radar-like “emission-bounce/feedback” functionality to identify movement, position and size within specified sector. Common nominators are always:

• the matter
  the matter is the matter/force emitted, and it is very rarely anything tangible. The most well known example is radar, where the emitted matter are radio waves. However, this is just one example as the matter can be anything that allows itself to be emitted, and when hitting an obstacle it bounces back. For example bats flying in the dark scream high frequency sound waves as their matter to detect obstacles. Engineers measuring groundwater resources rely on electromagnetic reflections from ground. Also light and air (pressure) are very common… It will be more than interesting to see which matter Apple and others adopt as each matter comes with some drawbacks (for example sound waves may affect to pets and other animals, electro-magnetic waves are very sensitive to other electronic devices etc).
• transmitter and receiver
  Transmitter is used to emit the matter with specified force/range, while receiver works as the opposite capturing the incoming matter with specified criteria. Usually these are physically the same device.
• target
  Target refers to obstacle that bounces back the emitted matter. In case of the portable devices, this refers usually to human user.

By itself, the data received by receiver is pretty useless numerical data consisting of angle of device, coordinates, volume changes in received matter etc. information used to measure and track changes in received matter. In order to provide something more meaningful, this data needs to be converted to more practical shape with a help of highly dedicated computer program that crunches massive amounts of numerical data to 2D/3D images and charts that can be used further (to recognize hand movements/gestures).

One very accurate question is what kind of specs future iPod (and other mobile devices) running touch-free technology would require to crunch numbers happily. From my limited experience I’d say current processing power is sufficient, but memory could still pose some problems especially with cheaper / affordable iPod models… Another aspect is related to power consumption. Larger display alone can be a huge energy consumer (in addition of being more expensive), but also transmitting & emitting matter, and processing gathered information require additional power consumption.

As a summary, one don’t need to be a great visionary to predict that the price of touch-free technology may be too high for casual consumer. In addition questions like “is it really of better usability” and “how hard will it be for common user to adopt something this revolutionary” are IMO worth asking.