This is apparently a hoax - but I'd bet this is where we're going with touchscreens (is this what the Apple tablet will look like?). Who wouldn't want their iphone full sized? I sure do.
Touch Screen
01/03/2010
03/08/2009
Natural User Interface (touchscreen)
Here's another player in the touch screen space called Natural User Interface. Sounds a lot like Surface and Perceptive Pixel. From their Website:
NUI is letting people “Touch the Future™” by delivering Innovative Multi-touch Solutions to a wide range of industries. Our client portfolio varies from global corporations to government organisations. Our products enrich the Interaction experience through it's innovative software and hardware solutions.
NUI is specialized in the revolutionary optical touch technology that supports single, dual and multi-touch.NUI's solutions can be used within a single user as well as multi-user collaborative environment.
03/07/2009
Microsoft Surface
“Minority Report meets the kitchen table.” Source
It's a tabletop device with an integrated 30-inch screen and five cameras to enable multitouch access to music, photos, and the web. $5,000-$10,000 per unit.
Video demos and promos here:
The most interesting demo I've seen is the Wine Guide one here:
What's interesting to me is that it's the one demo that bridges the physical world with information via the Surface in a significant way. Place a bottle of wine on the table and information about the wine pops out. More info from the company that builds these things for Microsoft here.
IdentityMine Wine Guide Solution - Tesco Wine Fair from IdentityMine on Vimeo.
Like Jeff Han's beautiful touch screen, the barriers to entry here seem monumental. There's a new coding environment, an expensive physical device, and brand new UIs to be learned by users. This is why all of the clients thus far are big companies using the thing as a gimmicky attraction. Overall, the apps that I've seen (thus far) seem like bulky solutions to fairly standard kiosking needs.
Nothing so comeplling as their really innovative visioning of UI in 2019.
Perceptive Pixel
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."
