I guess you don’t know you’re leading the pack unless you hear the other dogs barking at your heels. GestureTek is a company that puts out touch- and gesture-based interactive screens in more various forms than the Microsoft Surface project. From what I can tell, it doesn’t track as exactly or as reliably as the seriously stress-tested Surface, but it also has a more attractive form factor in this thing (autoplaying video warning). I can’t tell what it’s using to track movement, but it looks to be sufficient for the basic applications that would be running in, say, a mall kiosk: a map, sales, basic product browsing and so on.
Multi-touch and general touchscreen tech is the new tech Wild West, it seems, and like the Lotto, many will enter, only a few will win. Still, competition in this area is essential for innovation; every lackluster touchscreen phone that comes out gets immediately buried because the iPhone had already taken it to the next level. Same with the Surface, but that doesn’t mean either of those products are guaranteed against usurpation.
If you’re interested, head down to Florida on the 18th for the International Association for Amusement Parks and Attractions expo and check the thing out. (giggle)
Wow. I highly doubt, however, that it will be able to compete with Microsoft – but it does look cool.
Comparing Gesturetek to this: http://equedia.com/blog/view.php/Re-Microsofts-New-OS-Officially-Named-Windows-7
just doesn’t cut it
This touch thing is not working great from microsoft. It is targeted at businesses and not individuals.
Who would want to buy a damn costly surface, which occupies space, is not portable and has 10% intelligence of that of a netbook?
This is not a rival to Surface. Surface is much more advance. Applications on Windows 7 is probably more powerful than this.
Yea i don’t think this thing can hold a candle to the surface from the videos I have seen of the surface..the picture thing blew my mind. But this is cool none the less.
No, it’s certainly not going to take down the surface, but for places that want something like a surface but can’t afford it… or don’t want the table form factor, etc. A market (not a big one but a market nonetheless) has been created by the Surface, and it has a sort of halo market around it that makes room for stuff like this.
they have been around for years and have actually partnered with Microsoft Xbox division at one point.
it normally uses cameras and x/y coordinates, at least some of their tech.
Yeah, I thought it might be something like that but didn’t want to spend the time analyzing the photos :)
they just updated their lineup today, which is the reason we’ve posted. For the “floating” screen I wonder if it actually uses a system similar to the Surface’s..
Check out this system – also very cool:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYGyynUt2-o
We have worked with Gesturetek products for a number of years and did UI work for Microsoft Surface.
Gesturetek and Surface make essentially different products.
Gesturetek sells hardware.
Surface’s value prop. software-based:
- a seriously user tested SDK object recognition framework
- Deep integration into the MS product stack
- .net 3.0 development environment
When you look at the cost of serious app development, the differnce in hardware cost is insignificant.
You can find multitouch demo videos and market analysis at:
http://www.pointanddo.com
I think that Surface has become a software project due to touch integration with 7 and stuff, but it really started out as a hardware project. The proof of concept had to be hardware first, software second.