As I reviewed this debut of HP’s “wall of touch” I felt conflicted, a mix of happy and sad emotions. On one hand, I’m glad to see a large technology company investing in the development of publically available DOOH interactive walls because I feel they are an excellent medium for collaborative interactions. That is the end of my happiness…
Sadly…. the technology shown is simply a video wall with a camera based touch layer that appears to only supports up to 2 touches. For such as large display this feels counter intuitive. At first I thought that maybe it was a large TouchSmart display, which is how they positioned the release but it’s far from it. This is basically is a single user experience designed for people to watch an operator “play” with visually rich content on a large display. The technology needed to develop multi-user, multi-touch experiences is complicated, Schematic knows all too well how difficult this is since we created one in 2009, so I thought HP was breaking new ground towards a similar solution. Here is a video showing it in use.
This seems like a technology searching for a purpose. The stated use case for the wall of touch is primarily about calling up any content on the large display and having users interact with it as they would a website or TV channel. For HP it seems to be all about simple navigation to launch an application with no real consideration for why or how this unique form factor can improve upon the experience. The lack of UI design and multi-user collaboration proves to me that this is a technology project not a well thought through interactive platform.
Lets hope that once a few of these are deployed that interactive agencies like Schematic can begin to create custom content and experiences for the wall of touch that can harness its true potential.
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2 Responses to "HP’s Wall of Touch"
I saw this video as well a couple of weeks ago and had similar feelings. It seems these days that simply showing that you have a large touch screen counts as “forward thinking”. I did not see a single piece of useful technology rather it seemed more like “hey, we’re HP, look; we have a touch screen… I just touched it… look, it did stuff.”
My company uses a led video wall, the Spyder, and I don’t know if I’d actually like the touch style. I’ve used the video wall before and could be away from it with still getting my point across. I feel like if I stood up next to the video wall my associates would feel like they are in a classroom, and I am the teacher. So not sure how people would respond to the product.