Engadget is reporting that Epson, the folks that make printers and projectors, have released a multitouch table similar to Microsoft Surface. I love these big, horizontal multiouch surfaces so I was excited to read the article which includes a video and a German guy who says "Und" a lot.The thing I like most about this table is the fact that they have integrated speech recognition into the platform. Speech recognition and multitouch make for a very powerful combination - much more powerful than speech or multitouch alone. The thing I don't like about it is that its tag recognition systems appears to be limited to 16k unique IDs. That's not enough to make it practical for the really huge installations we are working on at CSG. For example, if you want to give all your customers a unique tag and you have several million of them then a 16k tag isn't going to cut it.
Apparently there is no published price and there doesn't seem to be any information about the type of operating system or SDK used to program these 52" tables. I'll see if I can get some more info from the company and report back later.
Update April 24, 2009
Here is another video of the X-Desk complements of C|Net UK.
Update April 26, 2009
Josh Blake wrote an interesting post criticizing X-Desk and assuring the Microsoft Surface team that they "should not be afraid of X-Desk at all". I haven't seen the X-Desk in person but I do know that Surface is well-made and that it will be hard for anyone to beat it as a multitouch table designed for commercial installations.
2 comments:
"Und" is German not Dutch.
It's a common mistake though, lots of "Dutch guys" speak German in hollywood movies too.
My mistake. I changed to "a German guy" from "a Dutch guy"
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