Multitouch has more or less turned into a buzzword these days - sometimes, its implementation makes sense and comes out as pretty useful (see the iPhone and Microsoft's Surface), however, other implementations turn out be debatable. There is another implementation out there, one that received a lot less attention from the press than the aforementioned cases: Jeff Han's Perceptive Pixel.
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Member since:
2006-02-26
Whatever they paid, it seems that it was a great investment. Because of the "Magic Wall" and John King's expertise with it, CNN is now the only channel I watch for election coverage.
I'm sure it won't be too long before large multi-touch devices like these hit the consumer market at reasonable prices. I can't imagine what practical use we would have for them, but I know I'd love to have a few in my house.
Member since:2006-02-15
I can't imagine what practical use we would have for them
I can't imagine anything that special that it would justify the cost of buying such a device. But something I'd personally love would be to have a big screen on the wall, all my photos, movies and music videos stored there, and to be able to sort all those with my own hands to their proper places. It's just somehow so natural to browse through pictures and arrange them on the screen using your hands. If you wanted to tag them or something, you could bring up a virtual keyboard, stretch it to a size suitable for your fingers and type away 
You could perhaps also put on some TV channel or some video, stretch is to a smaller size and move to some corner, have it there while arranging to pictures.. That would be a very intuitive way to do those things.
EDIT: I should have watched the video first, they did all the stuff I mentioned here in that 
So, anyway, it is cool tech and would work wonders as sort of a "living" picture and video album in your livingroom
Edited 2008-05-10 07:27 UTC
Member since:
2007-02-07
On the cheapest side of the alimentary chain, there is an alternative that could do the magic. Wiimote whiteboard anyone?
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/
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The CNN tittilation is mental masturbation.
It's perfect for the War Room Scenario but in general use it makes Star Trek Next Generation and everything that followed seemed more interesting.
It's re-representing data in a more "hands on" way of not using a mouse, on a big wall.
Greaaaat. Now I can see this being useful for Scientists, specifically climate changes in real-time, geological activities of fault line shifts, etc., but none of that has anything to do with this Big Screen, other than it's a cute way to zoom in and out while in a standing presentation position.
What makes or breaks such displays aren't the Interfaces, but the power of the tools these interfaces are connected with and their intended purposes.
Zooming in and out of National->State->County->City view over and over with Red vs. Blue demographics, repeat and rinse 5,000 times ala CNN gets boring real fast.
