Oh! Gizmo

By Evan Ackerman

It’s no secret what fans we are of the amazing, the incredible, the unrealistically expensive Microsoft Surface. TouchWall is sort of (kinda) like Surface, except vertical. You use it just like a giant multi-touchscreen (in this example, a sheet of plexiglass with a projector behind it). The functional difference between TouchWall and Surface is that TouchWall uses infrared lasers combined with an infrared camera to tell where your fingers are, as opposed to a camera. On one hand, this means that TouchWall can’t identify and interact with objects like Surface can. On the other hand, the TouchWall hardware that can “turn almost anything into a multi-touch interface” (including a sheet of cardboard) costs just “hundreds of dollars.” Take a look:

TouchWall is cheap and easy and does lots of cool stuff. That’s all well and good, but Microsoft is determined not to do the right thing and actually get something like this into production. Would it be cynical of me to suggest that maybe it’s because this has all the most useful features of Surface in a much bigger format for a fraction of the cost? Yes, yes it would be, but I’m suggesting it anyway.

VIA [ CrunchGear ]