This device is making a statement that hand-waving gestures are not usable

It's a creation by 3 young computer wizards from Singapore.

Ractiv, which focuses on how people interact with technology, are founded by three young computer wizards in their 20s. Darren Lim, 21 and Lai Xue, 22, met in high school, and together with Hyun Ki Lee, they performed a research in computer interaction that earned them the title of youngest awardees of Most Influential Chinese 2009-2010, hosted by Phoenix TV and with co-awardees such as Nobel laureate Gao Kun and Mission Impossible director John Woo.

Darren, the first Singaporean to clinch this award, also became the first Singaporean Thiel Fellow in 2013. Lai joined Intel right after high school, becoming their youngest ever full-time engineer.

In late 2012/early 2013, they started brainstorming how interaction today should evolve, and decided to found Ractiv to explore the possibilities of innovative interaction methods. Their goal is simple: to explore and innovate the current methods by pushing the boundaries of how people use computers. Touch+, its first product, is billed as the first affordable 3D tracking device that makes any surface multitouch and more.

According to Darren, ​Ractiv and its flagship product Touch+, are both unique in the market. Ractiv, he said, is a hardware startup that has managed all production on its own, which is rare in the startup world. Meanwhile, a key focus for Touch+, he said is to explore innovation in laptops, which he believes is an area that has seen little development over the years. “Instead of following market trends in 3D sensing, Touch+ makes a statement that the market trends are wrong, i.e. hand-waving gestures are not usable,” Darren said.

Ractiv, short for ‘interactive’ is proud to hold the title of being the first Singaporean company to join The Iron Yard startup accelerator in the US.

Ractiv founders wanted to create a platform that they could develop interactive technology and also to allow them share with others. Slowly, they built a great team with a single goal: to push the boundaries of interaction.

Darren said that Touch+ was born from a bus ride. While working on the bus, Lai found that moving away from the keyboard and to the trackpad was a hassle in the confined space, and wondered if it was possible to have the trackpad on the keyboard instead. After a long process of evolution, it eventually became Touch+.

According to Darren, Touch+ is designed to be a solution to multiple problems. First, he said, is the problem relating to the fact that users have to constantly shuffle from their keyboard to the mouse/trackpad. With Touch+, Darren explains that users can just rest their hands on the keyboard all the time.

Secondly, interaction is completely different for various devices, such as remote controls for TVs, which makes innovation with TVs difficult as users cannot easily interact with smart TVs. With Touch+, Darren notes that using any device is the same - touching what you see from any surface, just like the multitouch we know and love on tablets and phones.
Lastly, while the trend in interaction is towards a future of hand-waving gestures, Darren believes that is tiring and imprecise. Hence Touch+ goes against the market trend with the statement that multitouch is better than hand-waving gestures.

Currently, the total amount of funding of Ractiv is undisclosed, but the seed round from Red Dot Ventures was definitely more than USD200,000. 

Darren also shared that they are in discussions with OEMs as to integration of Touch+ into other devices, potentially enabling a single interface for all the devices we use today -- multitouch -- which would make interaction a lot simpler.

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COMPANY PROFILE

Name of the Company: Ractiv
Founders: Darren Lim, Lai Xue and Hyun Ki Lee
Website: https://www.ractiv.com/
Total Funding at hand: Undisclosed
Source of Funding: Red Dot Ventures and crowdfunding
Major Investors: Red Dot Ventures
Start of Operation: Early 2013

For startups wanting to be featured, send your message to Lee Anne Babierra at [email protected]