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.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
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:
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.