3M Announces Multi-touch Developer Kit

3M Touch Systems announced yesterday the availability of their Multi-touch Development kit which includes a 19" (16" x 8") screen which supports 10 points of simultaneous contact. It can display 16.2 million colors with a maximum resolution of 1440 x 900, which is decent for a desktop monitor.

The display is designed to be used with Window 7 and would make a good tablet except for the fact that it's 2.6" inches thick. What makes it interesting is that it supports 10 points of contact, something we haven't seen with projected capacitance screens this large (projected capacitance is the same technology used by the iPhone).

While this is good news I'm not as impressed as I should be. I'm pretty disappointed that the industry has not yet made available multi-touch LCD or Plasma screens or overlays that are larger than this and support more than two points of contact. The only way you can get a large monitor that supports more two points of contact is to do rear projection which is cool but is also really bulky (Just look at any multi-touch table).

The 3M developer kit costs $1,499.00 but from now until June 12th you can get yours for $999.00 - a $500.00 saving. What you might use it for I'm not sure but its probably the largest non-rear-projection solution that supports more than two points of contact available today.