This month we’ve been posting a lot about multitouch table technologies and providers. No discussion of multitouch computing would really be complete without mentioning the work of Jeff Han. A computer science professor at NYU, Han has been a leading proponent of multitouch computing for years. Back in February 2006, he gave a groundbreaking demo at the TED conference, which has been widely disseminated and was many people’s first experience of a working large format, multitouch screen.
It’s not unreasonable to date the ascendancy of multitouch walls and tables to this presentation. Of course, researchers have been pursuing this type of interaction since at least the 1980’s and the movie Minority Report predicted its future in 2002. And of course the iPhone has made this sort of multitouch interaction commonplace and available in millions of people’s pockets. But it was Han who first demonstrated to the masses a fully-functional high-resolution multitouch interface.
After the wild success of his TED demo and the other events that followed it, Han spun off his research technologies into a commercial venture called Perceptive Pixel. Perceptive Pixel has done some interesting work and has continued to increase the visibility of multitouch computing – most notably by providing large multitouch screens to news networks like CNN and ABC. As a result, most people have seen their technology in action. And it appears to be quite impressive.
Unfortunately, our experience has been that Perceptive Pixel is too busy or overwhelmed to respond to new business requests. We have attempted to get pricing from them for numerous projects, but general we can’t even get a call back from them. Perhaps that’s good news, that they can focus only on very large and groundbreaking rollouts – someone has to push the envelope. But we would certainly love to have the opportunity to hold Han’s technologies up against its competitors.
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