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The article presents an introduction an article within the issue about text typing and writing innovations in computer technology design.

As information technology becomes increasingly widespread, people are confronted with the burden of controlling a myriad of complex devices in day-to-day activities. Rather than making lives easier, as technology was intended to do, it has complicated the activities with lengthy instruction manuals and confusing user interfaces. Designers have been trying to make the computer more user-friendly ever since its inception. The last two decades have bought us the notable advances of keyboard terminals, graphic displays, and pointing devices, as well as the graphical user interface, introduced in 1981 by Xerox Star and popularized by Apple Macintosh. Despite of the emergence of pen-based and portable computers, the basic rules of interaction between man and machine have not changed. Thus, computer scientists came up with a new approach to human-computer interaction in which computing would not necessitate sitting in front of a screen and isolating from the world around. This concept marks a dramatic shift from the status quo in which interaction with the computer interferes with daily activities rather than enhancing them.

ThinSight is a thin form-factor interactive surface technology based on optical sensors embedded inside a regular liquid crystal display (LCD). These augment the display with the ability to sense a variety of objects near the surface, including fingertips and hands, to enable multitouch interaction. Optical sensing also allows other physical items to be detected, allowing interactions using various tangible objects. A major advantage of ThinSight over existing camera and projector-based systems is its compact form- factor, making it easier to deploy in a variety of settings. We describe how the ThinSight hardware is embedded behind a regular LCD, allowing sensing without degradation of display capability, and illustrate the capabilities of our system through a number of proof-of-concept hardware prototypes and applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]