The Multi-touch surface computing

These coffee table-sized devices have been appearing in business venues for a couple of years already. They are now becoming cheap enough for the consumer market.

This computing platform responds to natural hand gestures and real world physical objects. It has a 360-degree user interface and a large reflective surface, with projectors underneath which project images onto its underside. Cameras in the machine's housing record reflections of infrared light from objects and fingertip movements.

The surface is capable of object recognition, object/finger orientation recognition and tracking, and is multi-touch and is multi-user. Users can interact with the machine by touching or dragging their fingertips and objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, or by placing and moving placed objects. The platform can respond to over 50 touches at a time.

The use of multi-touch technology is increasing exponentially during this time. For example, sales of touchscreen phones will rise from 200,000 in 2006 to over 21 million by 2012, while iPads and other tablet devices are seeing similar growth.