This is cool: a giant screen touchpad – like a giant ipad. Except it can can keep track of the fingers of multiple users.
These screens maintain their sensitivity to touch even when mounted behind bulletproof glass up to one inch thick, which makes MultiTouch’s screens equally suited to the board room, a university lab or public displays. Though they are probably too expensive to put one in your home, unless your home has been featured on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous or Cribs.
How expensive? About $17,500. But like most things, that price will probably drop over time and, within a couple of years, I bet we see them on family room walls.
In the meantime, what are they being used for? Well … “A university is using it to perform virtual autopsies, with a realistic, 3-D model of a corpse …” Um. ok. What else?
At the Detroit Auto Show, eight people used one of these systems at the same time in a demonstration — that’s 80 fingertips and 16 palms to keep track of. In France, they’re already installed in photo-editing kiosks, where people can insert an SD card, touch up their digital photos with their hands, and print them. In Finland, one appeared on a public street for people to interact with, and in Venice, visitors to an art gallery used one to improve art that was designed with audience interaction in mind.
I do not need one of these. But I want one …
