Ayman Helweh
Edit
| Embed Video: |  |
|
Bill Gates demonstrated a new multi-touch computer and interface, called the TouchWall, at the Microsoft CEO Summit in Redmond on May 14. While Microsoft Surface’s steep price tag of $10,000 makes it too expensive for the average consumer, TouchWall is the poor man’s surface; with the system being constructed from “a few hundred dollars worth of readily available hardware.” Check out the above video for a demonstration of the TouchWall, which Gates calls, “the future whiteboard; the intelligent whiteboard” in action. Sadly, there are no current plans to market TouchWall as a product. Here is another video demo:
 TouchWall refers to the touch screen hardware setup itself; the corresponding software to run TouchWall, which is built on a standard version of Vista, is called Plex. TouchWall consists of three infrared lasers that scan a surface. A camera notes when something breaks through the laser line and feeds that information back to the Plex software. Early prototypes, say Pratley and Sands, were made, simply, on a cardboard screen. A projector was used to show the Plex interface on the cardboard, and a the system worked fine.
(crunchgear)References: crunchgear Filed In: |
Favorited by 
