Perceptive Pixel, Inc. was founded by Jeff Han in 2006 as a spinoff of the NYU Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences to develop and market a multi-touch system. He demo’d the thing at TED; the demo was amazing; and now he’s a leader in the field of this sort of touchable computing wall/table. See the video on his Website if you haven't already.
The big question for me with these interfaces is - what are the apps? Seems great for image manipulation - I've heard that the military is one of Han's big clients - and for newscasters - but what else, who is making them, and how do regular people get to use it?
Screenshot from it below.
And here's a good joke using it from SNL (starts about 1/3rd of the way) - that addresses the question above ... Is it useful or just a fancy toy:
Here's an interesting quote from a Washington Post article:
"One drawback: The Wall can display so much data simultaneously -- photos, videos, Google Earth maps, live streams of Web sites, charts -- that a viewer can quickly get overwhelmed. At times, the correspondents have manipulated so many statistical variables at once that it's hard to keep up with all the information cartwheeling across the screen."
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