Standard touch screen’s only allow someone to have a single point of contact with the screen and so only allows one ‘click’ or action at a time, similar to the mouse having a single pointer.

However, this piece of hardware and software allows people to directly manipulate what’s on the screen infront of them, no mouse or keyboard in sight.
Simply using fingers and hand gestures, a user is able to move, stretch, pan, zoom, rotate and even move within a 3D environment.
And for the traditionalist amongst us there’s even a keyboard that can be brought onscreen, which you can also move, stretch, pan and zoom like everything else on screen.

This is one the most impressive working concepts by far that I’ve seen for human computer interaction (HCI).
It has huge potential as the successor to the traditional mouse and keyboard that we’re all so use to.
August 22, 2006 at 12:48 pm
Here is a similar implementation of this idea I seen a while back. It uses an overhead projector and a touch panel, which looks kind of distracting but the concept is the same.
Interior designers eat your heart out.
Video: http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/res.....40x480.mpg
PDF: http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/res.....ST2003.pdf
August 23, 2006 at 12:14 pm
The video presentation is also up on everyone’s favourite video site, YouTube:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=PLhMVNdplJc