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18-Foot Multitouch Wall and New Multitouch Tech Hit the Streets
Danny writes to tell us that Obscura Digital has launched their largest multitouch wall yet. 18 feet of multitouch surface is divided to allow six simultaneous users, each with their own targeted audio. The massive wall can handle 100 hi-res images and videos together in real-time. Relatedly, Atmel recently announced the release of their "maXTouch" technology, which delivers a capacitive touchscreen that boasts a refresh rate and signal-to-noise ratio that's 66% better than their nearest competitor. Hopefully this means massive multitouch surfaces will be coming into my home sooner rather than later.
A very long stick with a rubber thing on the end may come in handy. Either that or buy a dart gun and just shoot at it.
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
It's true that you're not going to work 40+ hours a week holding your hands up to a wall. But brainstorming sessions and meetings will probably benefit from this. I think multi-touch and large screen interactive displays definitely have a utility, but we're going to have to explore its limitations over the next few years. Like speech recognition, it will probably find niches before it finds widespread acceptance.
E pluribus unum
"18 Foot Multitouch Wall and New Multitouch Tech Hit the Streets"! I hope no one was crushed underneath!
Anyone got a light for my sig?
Atmel makes some great microcontrollers, but their recent record of delivery is very poor and it has hurt their reputation. In particular, Atmel announced the XMEGA range of AVR micros years ago, but they repeatedly failed to become available: see AvrFreaks for just one of many discussions on the topic. A limit subset of the range is just becoming readily purchaseable now.
There are various theories about why Atmel has had such delays in producing the XMEGAs: upper management turmoil, the distraction of a takeover attempt by Microchip, the change to being fab-less, and serious bugs in the early XMEGA production efforts.
I hope I'm wrong, but I wouldn't be too surprised if these new chips aren't physically available for a long time.
OK. So they build this really big projection touchscreen. And then they divide it into sections because they don't have an application that can use it effectively.
That indicates a failure of imagination. But it's really just a PR device for the Hard Rock location in Vegas. It's not something anyone uses regularly. So its interface has to be trivial.
What could you usefully do with a touchscreen that big usable simultaneously by multiple people? Intelligence analysis? Maybe. But there's an inherent bias in something like that towards short-attention span behavior, which may not be a good thing in analysis. Trading platform? Might work; those guys already have too many screens. But they don't move their windows around much; they have many screens because they need their data to be in expected places. Architecture? Look at, yes; show to clients, yes, actually design, no. That's more likely to be one guy with a modest size touchscreen driving a wall-sized display.
I could see this as a management tool for a MMORPG, where the staff is trying to run a world, but the consequences of errors are low.