Back in March, we did a fairly extensive roundup of multitouch display technologies. While it was by no means exhaustive, we tried to cover most of the relevant and viable commercial options for someone wanting to create a multitouch system. But of course it’s a space that’s evolving quickly.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the huge Schematic touchwall, and this week I found on Crunch Gear an interesting product at the other end of the spectrum. Demand Evolution, based in San Francisco, is selling what they call “The Kit” directly from their website.
As the name implies, it’s basically a DIY multitouch kit that can be used to quickly and cheaply deploy a decent table-sized (50″ diagonal) multitouch display. That’s small compared to a wall, but large compared to, say, Microsoft Surface. You can get it with an (optional) stand, as shown above, that will allow you to orient it as a whiteboard, as a table, or as a kiosk like in the picture.
One of the major benefits of Surface, as we wrote back then, has been the relatively affordable price ($13,000) of the system. The Kit, at under $2,000, decidedly lowers the bar, potentially bringing the range within the budgets of students, tinkerers and the like. The Kit does not include a computer or a projector, so the all-in hardware cost of a system could be more like $5,000. Then again, depending on your project, a computer and a decent projector can always be useful for other things once it’s over. And even at $5,000 it’s still a lot cheaper than Surface.
Of course, it’s not well suited for public venue setups since it is not contained. But it’s extremely portable. The Kit also does not rely on any proprietary hardware, but instead embraces the many open-source tools that have been developed by the community. These features make this kit a natural choice for academics, artists, and anyone who wants to just play around with multitouch systems. As far as personal computing, there is still no “killer app” for multitouch screens that is going to drive them to the tipping point and make them ubiquitous. That means there’s plenty of room for visionaries and entrepreneurs to be developing the next generation of software on these tables. The availability of software like this can only broaden that field.
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