Disney Research, the bleeding edge guerilla technology arm of The Walt Disney Company, has created Touché, a system that can turn almost any object or substance into a multi-touch, gesture-recognizing interface. At its most basic, Touché could be used to enhance touchscreen devices like smartphones — but it could also turn everyday objects such as doorknobs, tables, liquids, or even your own body, into touch interfaces

Touché uses the same capacitive sensing technology found in smartphone and tablet touchscreens, but Disney has effectively supercharged it. Conventionally, capacitive touchscreens have a binary state — you are either touching them or you’re not. They do this by emitting a very weak electrical signal at a single frequency, and measuring any changes in voltage caused by your probing finger. Touché is the same, but instead of a single frequency being used, a range of frequencies is constantly swept through, developing what Disney calls a “capacitive profile.” Touching an object with one finger creates a certain capacitive profile, while two fingers (or a grasp, or a flat palm) creates different profiles. The best way to understand this approach is to watch the video at the end of the story (and take a look at the graph below).

The important thing to understand is that capacitive touch technology can be used with almost any object or surface. In the video below, Touché accurately and quickly detects gestures on objects as disparate as a doorknob, table, and water in a fish tank. In one very exciting example, the video postulates a future where you interact with your smartphone (or other wearable/implanted computer) by performing touch gestures on your own body. Grasp your own hands to stop the music, tap on your palm with two fingers to go forward a track, ball one hand to pop up the local weather on your Google Glasses HUD… and so on.

The possible uses of Touché are staggering. Imagine a bathtub that detects when your head hits the water, or likewise, a swimming pool that detects a young child who can’t swim. With Touché, you could create a doorknob that only opens if you grasp it in a special way — or a bookcase that only swings back to reveal your secret laboratory if you grab the right book with exactly the right grip. Imagine a mouse that a) knows who is currently using the computer, and b) responds to different grips. Maybe a five-finger “claw” could lower the DPI (sniping mode), while palming the mouse might enable “relaxed” mode with different button assignments.

The video suggests that Touché could also be used to train children to eat cereal using a spoon, instead of their fingers — a fairly silly example, but one that can be expanded to a system that helps a child with special needs. You could use Touché to keep track of a child’s movement in his crib, or a buzzer could sound if he gets out of bed in the middle of the night. Likewise, an alarm could sound if Little Timmy climbs out of his pushchair while you’re not looking. Really, the possibilities of Touché are almost endless, and really rather exciting. The only risk, of course, is that Disney might patent this idea and then never use it for anything other than a handful of Disneyland attractions — but I’m sure that won’t come to pass.

Read more at Disney Research, or check out Microsoft’s sound-based motion detection using your laptop’s microphone and speaker