Ideum mt2 Table is very cool!

Ideum, a company that develops computer and web exhibits for museums, announced today that they have released their own large multi-touch table, the mt² Table.

With screen 50" diagonal screem the mt² is significantly larger than Microsoft Surface (30" diagonal). It also offers higher resolutions, 1280 x 720 compared to Microsoft Surface's 1024 x 768, and it looks really cool to boot!

What I really like about the Ideum mt² Table is that it uses the NUI Suite 1.0 Snowflake gesture recognition system which supports the TUIO protocol and can therefore be programmed in several languages including Adobe ActionScript 3 (Flash), Java, C#, C/C++ and even Python. I would love to write a multi-touch application in Flash!

The table also comes with preinstalled software including multi-media viewer, an implementation of Google Earth, a 3D model render, and a few other things. It looks great except for the life of the bulb which is 3,000 hours compared to 6,000 hours for the Surface (projections bulbs are expensive). I'm not sure what the pricing or availability is yet - I'll update this post when I find out.

Update Feb. 6th, 2009

The folks at Ideum were kind enough to send more more details about the mt² including pricing.

Pricing for the Ideum mt² Table

• The mt² Table with full hardware and software package: $18,000
• On-site 2 day installation, calibration and care training: $5,000
• 1 Year hardware and software support and updates: $2,000
• Total (includes shipping, assembly and all other costs): $25,000

This is the pricing for non-profit organizations or 501(c)(3) organizations like museums, universities, libraries, and "approved" developers. I have no idea what the pricing is for profit driven companies or if the device is even available to them.

Right now it takes about 6 weeks to get a mt² after ordering it. They hope to bring that down to 4 weeks in the next few months and they may release a "kit" version that would reduce the price of on-site setup to zero. One more thing, although the mt²'s bulb life is only half of the Microsoft Surface they send an extra bulb with every unit so you effectively get 6,000 of bulb life total.