Touché is a new sensing technology designed to make the entire world around us richly interactive and responsive, easily and inexpensively. Touché can detect touch, proximity, and gestures on a wide variety of everyday objects and even on human body. Unconventional materials, such as water and living matter, can also be sensed to enable new and exciting applications.

Touché uses a new sensing approach that we invented called swept frequency capacitive sensing. Instead of sensing capacitive touch at one frequency, we sense hundreds of frequencies to construct a complex capacitive profile. This profile contains rich information about the state of the user and the objects that they interact with. Not only can complex gestures be sensed and recognized, but also proximity and the configuration of the human body during touch. Complicated instrumentation is not required; interaction cab be sensed simply by attaching a single wire to the object or user.

 

Touché is fundamental, general technology that enables endless number of novel exciting applications and interactive experiences that were difficult or even impossible to create before. See Botanicus Interacticus and Capacitive Fingerprinting projects for some of the in-depth explorations of the applications of Touché technology.