PlayTable finally saw the light of day in the form of Microsoft’s Surface multi-touch table. But there’s a related technology that’s been under development by Microsoft Research — “PlayAnywhere” — which still has yet to go commercial.At this week’s Faculty Research Summit, Microsoft researchers showed off, yet again, PlayAnywhere. Here’s how the IDG News Service described what was shown: “Andy Wilson, also a company researcher, is developing a device that could serve as a less expensive form of the surface computer that Microsoft recently unveiled. That computer will cost thousands of dollars. Wilson’s invention uses a projector to display an application onto any surface, like a table top. Two infrared lasers pointed at the surface would allow users to grab and drag items with their
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MPX already supported multiple input devices. Which blows pretty much all assumptions in user interfaces (input) out of the water. Now I’ve gone one step further and added support for multi-touch displays. Have a look at this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olWjnfBoY8E Upfront: I did not build some kind of touchscreen or tracking system. I did not build some kind of gesture recognition system. I built the stuff in between.A while ago I started thinking about how multi-touch and gesture support could look like. Looking around on the web and in the research literature, I found that all the multitouch systems are a hack (I’m talking about software integration here, not the hardware!). Multi-touch support needs to be in the windowing system. Any client-side approach is wrong. (Feel