Working at DFKI is awesome, and now there is a video showing the work done by Marcus Liwicki to bring touch-tables and collaborative work to the next level. This is a peak outcome by the people from our km group, led by Professor Andreas Dengel. Saher El-Neklawy did part of the programming, many people contributed here.
Others say:
if you’ve ever had to sit down with people at the collaboration table, I think you’ll recognize how well this system matches that experience. I really appreciate the approach they’ve taken, and I look forward to seeing where else it will go.
Our website says:
The touch&write pen-abled interactive touchtable combines infrared technology for the normal touching and moving with the digital pen technology for high resolution handwriting. This allows an intuitive switch between the modes object manipulation, and content editing.
Touch & Write is an innovative new platform for creating applications, that users find natural to use. It seamlessly integrates the paper world into the digital world. Editing, arranging and writing tasks can be easily performed in an intuitive way.
The construction of Touch & Write as a table top environment encourages collaborative settings. Users surround the table, discuss their ideas and work together. Since intuitive handwriting is allowed as an input metaphor, the creativity is furthermore supported.
Some of the shown parts in the demo are based on technology connected to things we do in the semantic part of DFKI, our department is a really nice environment to work in 😉
This all looks too familiar. No, I am not talking about the “Minority Report” user interface.
The touch table exhibits functions I have seen before in the movie from Alan Kay where he demonstrates GRaIL, the GRaphical Input Language system from about *1968*!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQhVQ1UG6aM
Remember, the demonstration is from 40 years ago. Amazing!