Defcon Kekekekekakl (blog)

This makes the basis for the next generation user interface!

Quote from site:

While touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact, multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations. Such sensing devices are inherently also able to accommodate multiple users simultaneously, which is especially useful for larger interaction scenarios such as interactive walls and tabletops.

This has to be seen, and the demo video is located at YourTube.com. Go see it now! You will easily see how I envision this to make a milestone in how we interact with computers and information systems. I have always had the opinion that the way we interact with information systems, by means of a physical pointer device and single point of interaction is counter-intuitive and cumbersome. Also, the confines of a single scale of visual representation makes utilization of display real-estate highly infefficient. By getting multiple
points of interaction direcly onto the display, and having the possibillity to
effortlessly move and scale information on the workspace, the user interaction
reaches a higher level.

This demonstration video is a demo of the research into someting called "Multi-Touch Sensing through Frustrated Total Internal Reflection" (see the research pages
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/index.html and http://mrl.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirsense/. Among the participants on this research is Jefferson Y. Han, a name perhaps best known from the development of CU-SeeMe, the now dead video-communications sotware

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Though not directly associated, the following is still interresting in
association with the above mentioned technology: http://www-ui.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~takeo/research/rigid/index.html