Boing Boing Gadgets has a great video and story on Schematic's large multi-touch wall in development for the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. The multi-touch wall appears, from the video, to be about 5 feet high and at least 10 feet long - the final installation may be much longer. The touch wall is probably the best implementation of this form factor yet. The visuals are well designed, aesthetically pleasing and have real utility.The UI is really well designed. The height of the wall is perfect for people standing, and each person interacting with the device has access to all functionality which emanates from their initial contact. That's critical in a large installation so that users don't have to move around the wall to use its features.
The aesthetics are excellent with an all black background, blue highlights, and muted secondary colors - its actually really beautiful.
In terms of utility you can't do much better. For self-identification, the wall uses RFID tags in the lanyards of the attendees, which must be held about 2 inches away from the screen in order activate personal information. That's important as you don't want on-lookers activating their personal schedules and networks (more on that in a bit) accidentally but you also don't want people to have to enter in their name and password to use the system. The software itself includes maps of the venue and the city, a personal festival schedule application, and a social networking application that allows two attendees to exchange contacts right at the wall.
While this implementation by Schematic is specifically for the Cannes Film Festival the software application and hardware could be deployed at any event and would make an excellent addition to any large modern building foyer. As one of the interviewees points out this type of form factor will probably become a part of the architecture for large buildings in the future.
Check out the video below which can be activated using the passcode "cannes" - Boing Boing Gadget's Joel Johnson promises to remove the pass code requirement when he "wakes up". Cool video, Joel! Great work Schematic!!
5 comments:
Awesome find, Richard! Thanks for posting.
np, GrapeApe. I'm really impressed with this thing.
I know that Schematic was the system integrator but WHO made the large touchscreen?
WallyWorld,
Good question. I had assumed that the multi-touch wall device was custom made by Schematic as is usually the case with these types of installations, but I'll ask and see if I get a response.
You are correct, the wall was custom built by Schematic.
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