Let's all come and play with DJ Bill Gates today!
What Gates showed on Wednesday was a 4-foot-by-6-foot prototype called TouchWall. Among the things that appealed to me was the idea that presentations might shift away from the sort of robotic slideshows enabled by PowerPoint.Yo, Trademark Grabbah! Yo, Trademark Grabbah!Along with TouchWall, Gates showed off the software that accompanies it, known as Plex. TouchWall itself uses infrared and laser technology to sense touch input, Microsoft said.
Gates: Every surface to be a computer [news.com via dt reader jason]
I wonder happens if you hit Touchwall with a snow-ball...or accidentally knock it down during rough play.
Microsoft didn't invent this. It was made by a small company whose name escapes me for the moment. In any case, we use it in the defense field for imagery analysis, and have for the past couple of years on an experimental basis. It's a great way to look at satellite photos and the accompanying metadata files and other reports. It's very similar in concept to the desk that was shown in Minority Report. John King also uses a version of this on CNN when he's doing his political analysis.
[the first/big touch interface guy's a professor at NYU...just a sec... Jeff Han. Perceptive Pixel. TouchWall is MSFT's version. -ed.]