In July, Microsoft announced it was buying Perceptive Pixel, which has been making massive capacitive touch screens for years. You may have seen them being used by cable TV news companies such as CNN to get interactive with election results.
This week at the BUILD 2012 developer conference, Microsoft allowed attendees to check out the biggest screen from Perceptive Pixel, a huge 82 inch 10 point touch screen that was hooked up to a Windows 8 PC. So naturally we wanted to see Neowin's front page on this monitor's display.
As you can see, it worked and we can report that links inside Neowin.net responded to our touch via the display. It's quite something to see a website on such a huge screen. We were tempted to actually post a news update via the touch screen, but decided that might not be wise with lots of people around.
By the way, the screen costs $30,000. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer hinted at the BUILD 2012 keynote this week that touch screens of these sizes will become more affordable in the years to come. However, it may be a long time before anyone besides large companies or the super rich will be able to get a big touch screen for their living room.
In a panel held earlier this week at BUILD 2012, Perceptive Pixel founder Jeff Han talked about creating the technology and software behind these screens. He admitted that touch screens do have some flaws, including the infamous "fat finger" which can never be as exact as a cursor connected to a mouse for controlling a PC interface.
Han believes the next step in big touch screen technology is being able to use fingers and a stylus at the same time for more precise work. Just don't expect thinks like what are shown in Minority Report. Han says that while Tom Cruises transparent screen and gloves may look cool, they won't really work in the real world.
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