Jeff Han is a founder of the Perceptive Pixel, a company dedicated to developing multi-touch sensors, promoting and developing applications for these. Their product is called Interactive Media Wall.
Watching Jeff working with it is very impressive and elegant in the same time. If you watch the videos posted on the web site you'll see what do I mean.
In video clip shown on the main page you'll notice almost non-existing user interface. Everything is based mostly on intuition and our habits. For example, to zoom in to picture (or video) place your fingers on it and move them apart. Picture is stretched to required size. Moving fingers closer will zoom out (shrink the picture)
To see this at action have a look at Jeff working here.
There are some elements that I have seen before but not in his previous demos. This includes some of the "physics" applied to the objects on the screen. Application of physics to desktop is demonstrated very nicely in 2007 (short post from June last year). Another common point between the two is use of gestures.
Some of examples where multi-touch sensors are used include maps and their use or manipulation. Here are some stills from his video.
If you are impressed and want to get one of these first make sure you have enough room because it is 8x3 feet big. And bring some money. something like $100,000!
Of course, they are not only one working with this technology. Microsoft has it's own Surface (my earlier post about it is here). Microsoft (Bill Gates himself) demonstrated "TouchWall" at the Microsoft CEO summit and they see great potential in this technology.
It's a natural extension of Office. We can take spreadsheet, word processing, presentation data, and get it into here.
This could be a good thing since they want to drive prices down so it becomes "kind of whiteboard".
I wish I could have one of these whiteboards...
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