The hardware in Mac Funamizu's gesture-controlled light switch would be very, very simple—after all, it's just a trackpad. But it's the input methods that make this exciting: just as laptop trackpads can track gestures for scrolling, this light switch would parse them to control up a roomful of lights, either together or in unison. The lights are mapped onto the pad as they are positioned in the room, and a simple sliding motion toward or away from a specific light would brighten or dim it individually. For maximum light-dimming suavity, the circular gesture function takes control of every bulb at once.

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A growing mass of people have been reporting that the omni-button trackpads on the new MacBooks are glitchy—every 50 or so clicks, the trackpad will stop responding for a few seconds at a time, even to hard clicks. Whether it's a hardware or software issue hasn't been officially confirmed by Apple, but a supposed email response from Steve Jobs promises simply, "Software fix coming soon." This isn't the first time there have been trackpad issues with Apple notebooks, but we haven't had any problems with our new MacBooks or Pros. What about you guys? [AppleInsider]

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Now that netbooks have lowered how much we're willing to pay for laptops with a smaller footprint, it looks like ultra-portables are looking for ways to justify their higher price point. In that vein, Fujitsu's upcoming P8020 is packing a multitouch trackpad that'll allow those pinching zoom in, zoom out motions and circular unlimited scrolling gestures currently seen on Macbook Pros. Is that, and the 1.4Ghz Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of memory, 120GB hard disk, DVD burner and GMA 4500MHD video card enough to make it worth $US1,800? I guess we'll see come November. [Fujitsu Store via

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One of the biggest new features in the new MacBooks that Apple just unveiled is the glass trackpad, one that ditches the button in favour of turning the entire trackpad into a button. It also works with a bunch of new gestures, using up to four fingers to make doing things like switching between applications and flipping through a photo slideshow easier. It's pretty cool, but definitely not as cool as the concepts we've seen with a screen underneath, making the whole trackpad-is-the-buttons much more logical. Where's the screen, Apple?

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Synaptics, best known for developing the Zune Pad and Android G1 screen, have unveiled two new multitouch gestures for their PC touchpads: two-finger flick and ChiralRotate. Two-finger flick is fairly self explanatory — you swipe your finger from side to side on the trackpad and it will move through a series of files, such as photos, and initiate different app-specific "modes" with a flick up or down. ChiralRotate lets you move your finger in a circular motion on the trackpad, and it will move through a series of images in full screen or slideshow mode.

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Alps Electronics has decided to take the occasionally annoying sensitivity of some capacitive trackpads to a new extreme, demoing a technology that can accurately sense fingers without coming in direct contact with them. The system is able to sense movements at an admittedly modest range of 3cm, from which distance users can control applications with a range of gestures.

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The UnMouse Pad is like the MacBook Air/Pro's multitouch trackpad on steroids. On display at the Microsoft Research Summit (which also housed the Microsoft Sphere), this Joint project between Microsoft and NYU utilises Force-Sensing Resistors to create one giant, mouse pad-sized circuit. In the last part of the video, you can see the insane amount of input points the UnMouse Pad can track and the rising bars indicate the amount of pressure applied at each point (especially when I press my whole hand on the pad). And according to creator Ken Perlin, the technology used in the UnMouse Pad is apparently dirt cheap as well, which could make it friendly for consumer markets. [Microsoft Research]

New Apple notebooks are most certainly coming in the next six to eight weeks, and they will probably have the most extensive design overhauls in years. And the long-fabled MacBook touch might finally appear on the mortal plane. But the best rumour, we think, is that the new MacBooks will have a glass, multi-touch trackpad. But, uh, why is there no mention of a screen or display underneath the glass? Why make a fancy glass trackpad that isn't a multi-touch screen?

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You can already do a handful of gestures on the new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro's trackpad, but Apple's going in and patenting a whole bunch more. Not only are there gestures in this application that involve a thumb and three fingers--something casual users will probably never use--but there's even a sample of how this would work for games like Tetris (shown after the jump) or Final Fantasy. Each "chord" would correspond to a character or movement or attack or something, which is definitely not simple like the Firefox/Opera mouse gestures we've gotten used to. Still, more gestures are always good, and we're sure the end product won't be ridiculous like these. [Unwired View via Crunchgear]

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