I was meandering around the web today, beginning with watching some videos of the awesome work that Interknowlogy has been doing with the Surface computer. I was curious to see if they (and Surface computing) were the brains behind CNN's "Magic Wall". It turns out that they are not, but they are doing some amazing things with Surface. They even won Microsoft's 2008 Smart Client Partner award.

My next stop was google, to find the creator of the Magic Wall. That, I learned was Jeff Han and his company, Perceptive Pixel.This led me to the TED website which h as a video of Jeff Han demoing his early work with multi-touch screens in 2006. Before the iPhone and before Surface surfaced.

But that made me wonder about the timing. Surely the Surface took more than a year to develop. MSR coulnd't have begun with Han's work. According to this Microsoft Press Pass document, the first Surface prototype was born in early 2003.

And what about the iPhone? According to this Wired article, in early 2005, "Apple's hardware engineers had spent about a year working on touchscreen technology for a tablet PC". (the Lenovo touchscreen tablets came out in late 2006). Apple's international patent for their multi-point touch screen came in April 2005.

And what about HP's Touchsmart All-In-One computer?There's nothing I can find that indicates it is multi-touch. So essentially, it's more like my Lenovo X-60, if you were to break the keyboard away from the monitor and put the monitor on a stand. Or better to compare it to more classic slate tablets - say, a Motion with a touch screen that uses WIndows Vista. Very nice, but not multi-touch. The interesting thing to me about this is that the consumer market might skip right over Tablet PCs and go for the touch screen.

Either way, it was fun to watch the video of Jeff Han demoing his prototype. And the beaty of the TED site is that you can find related videos. From Jeff's, I found a link to Blaise Aguera y Arcas from Microsoft demoing Photosynth in early 2007.

But now I need to get back to work to see how much I can get done before the end of the year! :-)

Happy New Year to all!