How cool! While this touchless capacitive touchpad is not a usable technology at this point (“it often malfunctions”), it’s certainly promising. Not necessarily for notebooks, where tapping and precise multi-touch are key, but for perhaps public kiosks or interfaces that require more basic interactions and simultaneously are hotbeds for germs.

Its extra-sensitive capacitance detectors are specially designed to report minute changes in object position, and I’m hoping they’ll be able to tell how far it is from the sensors as well. They’re still working on the technology, but maybe you won’t need special gloves for Minority Report-style big computing after all. [via HardOCP]