With a two-finger swipe, the video played faster and with three fingers it played faster still. Zhao even did his Mike Fratello impression, circling one of the players in red with another swirl of his finger, much as the “telestrator czar” does on TV.

In another corner of the cramped hallway that serves as the show floor, Canada’s GestureTek showed some of its wares. On the floor is the kind of display that has become common at malls and other places, while another setup featured a driving game that can be controlled with nothing but a user’s two hands, gesturing in mid-air.

It’s intuitive, but tricky to master. One uses their hands as a steering wheel, spreading their hands out to accelerate and bringing them together to slow down.

On stage, speakers discussed both new areas for exploration as well as the key hurdles the industry still faces–issues of cost, size, and accuracy.

As far as what’s in the future, one interesting topic had to do with displays that themselves can mold or “deform” themselves in response to touch.

Such technology is not here today, but is probably not more than three to five years out, said Christophe Ramstein, chief technology officer at Immersion, a company known for its force feedback technology. Ramstein said he is talking with a lot of large companies about the potential of that area.

“It’s a big area,” Ramstein said. “They are interested.”

In his speech, Han talked about what he and his company — Perceptive Pixel — are up to these days. Although a lot of the company’s business is in the industrial and government space, Han noted that his company has become best known for the touch wall systems it has sold to broadcasters like CNN, which used them in its election coverage.

“We actually didn’t think broadcast was an area for us,” Han said. “They found us at a military trade show.”

He also showed a clip of the “Saturday Night Live” parody of the election coverage, saying it makes an important point. “It’s a really fine line for us between something that really works…and falling into a gimmick,” Han said.

And while the show is small, the 270 attendees are more than the show’s organizers had expected, leading to a shortage of dishes, but an abundance of energy.

Speakers at the conference include big names like Microsoft and multitouch pioneer Jeff Han, while the small show floor serves as a showcase for start-ups, along with those that supply the base components needed to power touch screens and other interactive displays.
The success of Nintendo’s Wii and Apple’s iPod have shown the consumer appeal of devices that respond to human touch and movement, but a quick glance around the San Jose, California Hilton showed just how young the industry is.
Ashton Kutcher shows Demi Moore something on his Apple iPhone using the touch screen.

Ashton Kutcher shows Demi Moore something on his Apple iPhone using the touch screen.

While this week’s RSA 2009 show fills the Moscone Center a little ways up north in San Francisco, California, the Interactive Displays 2009 conference barely fills a mid-size ballroom here. Its show floor more closely resembles a science fair than the glitz of a big-time trade show.

But if you used one of the interactive displays here to show a heat map of this industry, it would glow red hot. That’s because touch displays, for years relegated to kiosks and industrial uses, are quickly becoming mainstream.

Hewlett-Packard and Dell already have touch-capable machines, while Microsoft is set to make gesture input standard with Windows 7.

Among those young companies is a San Jose-based outfit called 22miles. Like many of the companies here, its core business has been one-off projects for hotel displays. But the company is also hard at work on technologies that go way beyond powering an interactive directory.

With a swipe of his finger, CEO Joey Yu Zhao pulled up a prototype interactive TV application. A video of a basketball game started playing. Zhao used a finger to pause the game and then swiped his finger to play in slow motion.
Han also took the crowd on a bit of a journey back in time, reminding folks that while the multitouch business is young, its technology roots stretch back decades.

For his own part, Han said he was inspired by seeing a PBS documentary in the early 1980s that showed Microsoft researcher Bill Buxton, then at the University of Toronto, using multitouch to compose music on a computer. The computer itself was a green screen with an ancient processor and little memory, but the key underlying concept was already there.
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This message was sent to us from Brice Royer:

—————-

Subject: Are you going to meet Jeff Han?

Hey,

Jeff Han will be appearing in San Jose! I just read the program for Interactive Displays 2009 and I’m really excited.

You can read the full story here: (Thanks Joan for the tip!)
http://www.int-displays.com

Keynoting the conference will be Jeff Han of Perceptive Pixel and Steven Bathiche, the guy that invented Microsoft Surface. There are lots of sessions on multi-touch development and plenty of product demos too!

The conference is being held in San Jose, California on April 21st – April 23rd, 2009. If you plan to attend, you’ll have a chance to meet Jeff and Steve. It’s going to be awesome.

It would be great to meet other multi-touch developers and designers at this conference. If you are going, please leave a comment!
Talk soon,
Brice Royer
Community Organizer

You may know Jeff Han, you’ve probably seen his company Perceptive Pixel’s Interactive Media Wall / Multi-touch Collaboration Wall, but the missing link to this stuff is taking it home. Well, the wait is apparently over, and for once it’s Neiman Marcus we’ve got to thank. While you’re shopping for the latest

must-have fall fashions, be sure to stop by the newly anointed Futuristic Displays That Don’t Belong at Neiman Marcus Shop to pick up your 8 x 3-foot multi-touch display for a cool $100,000 US, only ten times the price of Microsoft’s

forthcoming Surface. Don’t worry, your family will appreciate your investment; trust us, we really think they’d far prefer it to, say, Christmas presents, a home to live in, or dinner at some point in 2008.

LAS
VEGAS, January 7, 2008 – Bordeaux, France-based JazzMutant, a pioneer
developer of multi-touch sensing technology, announced today at the
International CES that it is launching an OEM business unit in response
to a growing demand for its multi-touch solutions by electronic device
manufacturers and third-party system integrators.

In addition, the company is being renamed Stantum
Technologies http://www.stantum.com,
with JazzMutant remaining the brand name of its music product division,
which includes the award-winning Lemur multi-touch surface controller
for audio and media applications and Dexter laptop-sized surface
controller for digital audio workstations.

“Since we introduced Lemur, interest in our patented
technology has increased to the point that we are now working with
leading companies in various business areas, including aerospace,
consumer electronic and medical imagery, to mention just a few,” said
Guillaume Largillier, co-founder and CEO. “It was time for JazzMutant
to evolve into Stantum Technologies.”

The new OEM business unit will provide Stantum
customers with tailor-made, integrated and cost-effective multi-touch
solutions – by way of components or licenses – that precisely fit their
individual needs, according to Largillier.

“Our aim is to become the major stakeholder of
tomorrow’s man-machine interface industry, making the way people
interact with their working tools, computers or other electronic
devices more intuitive, playful and reliable. Providing our unique
tactile screen technology to companies on an OEM basis – as a one-stop
multi-touch solution – will also significantly strengthen our market
position.”

Stantum’s technology portfolio offers true multi-touch
interfaces that let users simultaneously move an unlimited number of
fingers, nails or utensils such as styli on a screen. Fitting any
form-factor, it enables integrators to design extremely innovative
multi-touch interfaces for their own products, thus simplifying the
development process and considerably shortening the product’s
time-to-market.

The latest in the JazzMutant line is the SMK-15.4 Multi-Touch Development Kit. This new product enables you to build the ultimate in multi-touch user-interfaces.

The development kit is based on Stantum’s five year experience in the design and production of multi-touch systems.

Included in the system is a multi-touch 15.4” WXGA 1280×800 display, embedding Stantum patented scanning and filtering technology, Pmatrix high resolution multi-touch sensor, and all the drivers you could need.

JazzMutant has announced that the Multi-Touch Sensing Technology available on an OEM basis.

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MIT’s Technology Review has an insightful 5-minute interview of Jeff Han speaking about the potential to provide more natural interfaces to virtual worlds such as SecondLife. He describes using a Multi Touch interface in Second Life as “swimming through the virtual world”.

Jeff Han: “It’s amazing the richness that they’re [virtual worlds] trying to convey … but it’s frustrating that we’re still trying to control that through the thin straw of a mouse and keyboard interface. ” [ via Technology Review ]

Jeff Han speaks about his opinions on Multi-Touch technology, the iPhone, and more at Nextfest 2007. He was showing off Perceptive Pixel’s 16 foot long multi-touch system, and the interviewer asked him about the UI, what he thinks of the iPhone and other systems, and how much he must hate Minority Report jokes. [Perceptive Pixel via NextFest]

Here’s another amateur video of Jeff Han of Perceptive Pixel demoing his advanced multi-touch system at WIRED NextFest 2007. Notice how much the kids love interacting with this.

Part 1:

Part 2:

(Note: the laughter on the footage is not the author of the video, it belonged to a mom who was enjoying her son’s excitement):

[ via Hustler of Culture ]

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