Mitsubishi's 3D touch panel

Engadget has an interesting, if brief, article on a new touch screen technology demonstrated by Mitsubishi that can detect fingers above the screen as well as their trajectory and rate of speed.

There are probably lots of ways to take advantage of this but the one that peaked my interest was the ability to have a "mouse over" like gesture in multitouch - something that you really can't do right now. The "touch above", if you will, would allow the application to provide clues (afforances) as to what an object does without actually touching the screen. This is useful because the afforance would only appear when the finger is hovering over the controler rather than being present all the time. Think of it as a Just-In-Time afforance.