In this demo at the 2006 TED conference, Jeff Han shows off a high-resolution multi-touch computer screen--his prototype drafting table-cum-touch display, developed at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences--that may herald the end of the point-and-click mouse. The demo, which drew spontaneous applause and audible gasps from the audience, begins with a simple lava lamp, then turns into a virtual photo-editing tabletop, where Han flicks photos across the screen as if they were paper snapshots. (The Apple iPhone, to be released a year later, also does multi-touch -- but only with two fingers.)
"When I think of initiatives like the $100 laptop, I cringe when I here that we are going to introduce an entire new generation to the mouse-window-keyboard interface. This is how we should be interacting with the machine from now on." - Jeff Han
The demo included a virtual lightbox, where he moved photos by fingertip -- as if they were paper on a desk -- flicking them across the screen and zooming in and out by pinching two fingers together, as well as a Google Earth-like map that he tilted and flew over with simple moves.
When the demo hit the web, bloggers and YouTubers made him a bit of a megastar. (His video has been watched more than 600,000 times on YouTube alone; "Amazing," "Incredible" and "Freaking awesome" are the typical responses there. Also: "When can I buy one?") After this legendary demo, Han launched a startup called Perceptive Pixel -- and when he came back to TED2007, he and his team brought an entire interactive wall, where TEDsters lined up to play virtual guitars.
From Fast Company article, Can't Touch This:
"People want this technology, and they want it bad," says Douglas Edric Stanley, inventor of his own touch-screen "hypertable" and a professor of digital arts at the Aix-en-Provence School of Art in France. "One thing that excited me about Jeff Han's system is that because of the infrared light passing horizontally through the image surface itself, it can track not only the position of your hand but also the contact pressure and potentially even the approach of your hand to the screen. These are amazing little details, and pretty much give you everything you would need to move touchable imagery away from a purely point-and-click logic."
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