Hitachi's giant multi-touch interface
By Adam Richardson, CNET.com
09/01/2008
At the Consumer Electronics Show, Hitachi is demo'ing a product called Starboard that is a multi-touch interface at a very large scale. You can use it to control a regular PC, and they've also got some custom applications for it. One of those is shown in the video.
What's interesting is that this is a projected interface, so it's untethered from the need to have a touch-sensitive LCD. This allows it to scale very large relatively inexpensively. They were also showing a wall-size version.
The projector in both cases was a very short throw Hitachi model that could produce an amazingly good image from an extreme angle. For the one in the video, the projector lens was maybe a foot above the surface, perched top-center of the image. Yet the image was completely distortion free and perfectly rectangular and about 1.2m across. Same thing with the one on the wall, which was an even more extreme example.


