oh boy
Nice one woebot. There's actually a ton of research going on in this area right now in academia, google "tabletop display" (which is what that is) in google scholar if you want a taste. that is a very nice demo though. Anyway, I happen to be taking a couple courses about this kinda stuff right now (how to design computers to be usable by humans, what kind of new interface techniques to use, etc), so this stuff is heavily on my mind these days. hence, i'm about to go on a bit of a mind dump here about other cool stuff in this area...
so well, lots of research into the use of tables as collaborative areas, and how that space can be digitized. Things like the
iRoom (fully digital meeting room: tabletop display, walls covered with screens, essentially behaving like one big screen.) And then of course having everything remotely viewable by a bunch of other similar rooms across the world. And there are lots of fun non-business applications of this (
like sharing digital pictures ).
Also definitely plenty of research into how to interact with these big surfaces using gestures of different types (there's probably better papers, but these are the ones i know)
http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~ravin/papers/uist2003_tabletop.pdf
http://www.merl.com/reports/docs/TR2005-091.pdf
another big thing is having normal physical objects interact with digital surfaces and take on digital meanings, like for instance
this using physical representations of buildings to "anchor" a map (like in that demo) so that you manipulate the buildings and this controls the orientation of the map. The general idea falls under the heading of "tangible bits"
but if you'll allow me to continue blabbing on about other cool things, there's plenty of other crazy futuristic tech being developed these days.
like a speach synthesis system that uses hand gestures to speak. watch the video, it's excellent
http://hct.ece.ubc.ca/videos/GloveTalkII/gtalpha.avi (20MB).
Using eye movement to control computers (eg,
http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/papers/dfono_CHI2005.pdf)
tons of crap on wearable computers and the like
and of course there's also excellent things like the virtual retinal display, which displays and image directly on your retina using low-powered lazers. According to my prof it looks absolutely amazing. (yes this does exist! deveoped
here and being commercially developed
here )
the Computer Science department here at UBC just got a brand new building and got all sorts of cool toys along these lines. For instance, not one, not two, but THREE 3 metre X 8 metre screens, to be used with high-res, high-refresh rate projectors (for resolutions in the 10 000 X 4 000 range, with 3D display capabilities), as well as motion-capture cameras for touch input. A 3D printer (as in, a printer that prints 3D objects). Ultra high dynamic range monitor (200,000:1 contrast) from
these guys . Also a motion-capture studio, full video editing suite and sound-proof recording studio with 50+ speaker surround sound...just because.
anyway, point being, we're already at minority-report style interfaces and are looking beyond, really...
alright phew! I just super nerded out there for a bit. that's your 2-minute update on cool human computer interface technologies that i know about. if you want more stuff the reading list for human interface technologies course
here is a pretty good reference.
sorry about all this, but i've been feeling that futurist rush for about 4-5 months straight now....