As many of you know, I currently work for Microsoft and more than that I have been a Microsoft-based developer since the Visual Basic DOS days.  Even with that lineage, I am rarely impressed by new technology, or gadgetry in some cases, but having the possibility of Multi-touch on a PC seems awfully impressive to me (See Video Below). 

In the office that I work in, we have a Microsoft Surface table, and I've spent some time playing with it, and I see some possibilities with it from a end-user perspective.  However, at the end of the day, I have been wondering how Multi-touch technologies will play out.  Meaning, I can see Multi-touch working in the small device market (ala. the iPhone and now other copycat phones) and something like the Surface (and now the Multi-touch Wall idea), but I am having a hard time seeing how it would play out on the world of the PC/Laptop/Tablet PC.

The demonstration that you will see in this video has me starting to wonder about the types of applications you could build with Multi-touch for the PC, which might be very different from what would work on a smaller device (e.g., phone/hand-held) or a big device (e.g., Surface). 

In the video, the demonstration that you see is done using what looks like a Windows Tablet PC, which alleviated one of my concerns: That my arms would get tired dragging stuff around on my 21" desktop monitor.  I can see the possibilities on my laptop-size device, especially if I turn the screen over to tablet-mode (although the market for Tablet PC today is very small as compared to other laptop form factors). 

At the end of the day, between the iPhone, Microsoft Surface, and upcoming technologies like the Multi-touch wall and Multi-touch PC, I think we are very close to some of the technology seen on movies like The Minority Report, but without the fancy 3-Finger gloves to manipulate the surfaces.  I might buy a pair anyway, because they looked cool! smile_wink

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Here's the video:

 

Those are my thoughts, let me know what you think (Post below).

~ Robert Shelton