LCD screen can recognise what happens in front of it

An everyday LCD screen has been modified to "see" the world in front of it in 3D. That means a viewer can control on-screen objects by waving their arms in the air without touching the screen, let alone a mouse or keyboard.

"This is a level of interaction that nobody's ever been able to do before," saysRamesh Raskar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, who created the prototype shown in the video above with colleagues Matthew Hirschand Henry Holtzman, as well as Douglas Lanman at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

The screen – dubbed BiDi, short for bi-directional – allows users to manipulate or interact with objects on the screen in three dimensions. It will also function as a 3D scanner, he adds. "If you spin an object in front of screen, the software will stitch together a 3D image."