December 20th, 2008 | 
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It is often assumed that touch-screen device can be made smaller, because they do away with the need for buttons. But paradoxically, they are often larger than the push button gadgets they replace, according to Patrick Baudisch at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, and Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington.
It’s the “fat finger” problem that is to blame. It is hard to hit small touch targets on a screen because your finger hides what you are aiming for.
Last year, Baudisch and Daniel Wigdor of Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, led a team that developed a fix to that. Their “transparent” LucidTouch device let users interact with a screen from the reverse sideMovie Camera.
A new, smaller prototype created by Baudisch and his student Gerry Chu at the University of Toronto takes the idea further. Called NanoTouch, it has a 6-centimetre (2.4 inch) screen and a touch pad of the same size on the back . It can detect the touch or press of a finger, allowing the user to move a tiny cursor around and click and drag with it…
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