YouTube Video: Doug Look and the Multi-Touch Wall

I had an earlier blog posting entitled: Touch Wall: Manipulating CAD data with just your hands. In the words of Paul Harvey, here's the rest of the story.

Senior Strategic Designer, Doug Look, is our newest member of the Autodesk Labs team. He is based in Chicago. I am in Scottsdale. Labs is in San Rafael. We are a distributed team. The world is indeed flat. Prior to being a designer, Doug was an architect. Doug has been working with our design software on our Multi-Touch Wall from Perceptive Pixel.

See Doug in action via YouTube

The Multi-Touch Wall is a multi-touch input device produced by Perceptive Pixel and invented by researcher and TED conference luminary Jeff Han. Single touch devices, such as a TabletPC or kiosk at a shopping mall, have been around for years. What distinguishes a multi-touch device from its predecessors is that it recognizes more than one input simultaneously. So instead of just touching the screen with the tip of one finger, the device recognizes gestures that you make with one or more fingers. Recognizing these gestures provides computer applications with new opportunities for processing user input.

Autodesk Labs believes multi-touch human-computer interfaces may dramatically change how products, infrastructure, and buildings are designed. You can see Doug grab a section of a city and mock up a building on the site. With the advent of multi-touch devices, one day we will look back at the mouse and ask "What were we thinking?" Developing software to leverage new ways of interfacing with computers is alive in the Lab. And now you know... the rest of the story. Please tell us what you think: thelabs@autodesk.com.