Get touchy feely with your digital media

Microsoft’s new Surface platform looks set to be the Next Big Thing for interactive experiences. The same level of “wow” factor as when touch screens finally got reliable ten years ago or so and started appearing in all sorts of kiosk type environments. It remains to be seen whether this will be as intuitive to use as we would like, or will require a steep learning curve as with any other new GUI.

http://www.microsoft.com/surface

This seems very similar to this multi-touch screen with gesture-based control from Perceptive Pixel (a bit like the ones seen in the film Minority Report, albeit with a physical screen and 2d images, no gloves, and no Cruise).

And this intelligent white board for motion modelling based on engineering sketches just blows away any of the current crop of over-priced boards being installed in schools up and down the country.

Update: a much longer presentation with more background explanation from Mark Bolger, MS Director of Marketing for Surface computing can be found here: http://on10.net/Blogs/larry/first-look-microsoft-surfacing-computing/

…and another MS Surface marketing exercise published through Popular Mechanics

Update2: A further demo and talk by Jeff Han (founder of Perceptive Pixel) from Feb 2006 (just sit through a short advert first): http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/65