Wouldn't it be cool if you had a gigantic multi-touch computer screen (like the iPhone)? Well, we made one for our 4th year design project. The screen measures 48" diagonally, a nice size for a workspace or for multi-player games. Here's a video of our table in action, running on Windows 7.



How does it work? We used a physics phenomenon called frustrated total internal reflection. If you shine light into the side of a sheet of acrylic (Plexiglas), the light will be trapped inside due to total internal reflection (gr 12 physics). Now when you touch the surface, it "frustrates" the light at that spot and so light escapes. You use a camera to capture this image and figure out where the finger was pressed. You can see a picture of what our camera captures when a hand touches the table:



Clarification: The team consists of myself and 3 male classmates. Nonetheless, 25% is still several times higher than the percentage of female students in my class.

The View from Computer Engineering

I’m a student in Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo, starting 4th year this summer. There are only 4 girls in my class (out of about 100) so I want to share my rather unique experiences with the women in engineering blog. I want to give an inside view of computer engineering for students who are considering this or electrical engineering.

So what is computer engineering (CE)? At Waterloo, it is part of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department, which means there’s quite a bit of overlap with electrical engineering. Courses in the 1st year cover a wide range of topics, including introduction to calculus, discrete math, physics, computer programming, circuits, and even chemistry. Once thing that surprised me was that the stuff you learn in these foundation courses are actually used in upper year courses. The core CE courses start in 2nd and 3rd year and include digital circuit design, operating systems, and compilers. Because of this, it would be difficult to switch between electrical and computer engineering after 2nd year. In 4th year, there is a design project course and 9 electives.

I know some of these subjects might seem daunting to high school students, but if you have a good background in math, science, and preferably computer programming, you can learn the rest of it.