Touchscreen awesome-ness from CES

Forget about Pre, Palm's new "best in Show" phone. Instead, check out PQ Labs Multi-Touch G² (aka the 'iTable') which is by far the coolest thing at the Consumer Electronics Show.


Simple, cheap, and really high quality. Great stuff!

PQ Labs Multi-Touch G² is a touch screen overlay that can be easily mounted onto any LCD or Plasma TV monitors. This simple, lightweight and low cost solution let you deploy Multi-Touch technology instantly to existing monitors without the need of any configuration. Multi-Touch G² is connected to the computer via a USB cable.

Below is the main promo video from PQ Labs. Here's a nice demo of it using Google Earth. For you gamers, there's a "Multi-Touch Warcraft" demo.



From PQ Labs Inc: Multi-Touch is not just about multiple fingers. It's all about human-computer interaction in the most intuitive way. In the Multi-Touch Warcraft game powered by PQ Labs, finger and fist are mapped to different actions. Hitting the enemy with your fist means attack. In between the real world and the virtual world, Multi-Touch is your bridge. You can physically interact with the virtual world without menus, commands. The interface just disappears. With PQ Labs Multi-Touch technology, the interaction becomes a "REAL" digital illusion.

Via CrunchGear: Two of the most notable features of the Surface are its multitouch capabilities and the availability of a development SDK, both of which PQ Labs has matched (or, in the case of the SDK, plan to match soon). The number of fingers detected by the multitouch sensor is limited only by the individual software designer’s desire - the hardware itself supports as many simultaneous prods as you can throw at it.



Of course, this isn't a new idea. Microsoft has been promising Surface since Tom Cruise got us all hooked on the idea in Minority Report. But as Google has taught us all, you don't have to be first to come out on top. The cheesy-named iTable from PQ Labs is awesome. It is beautiful, cheaper and much more compact than the highly anticipated but yet-to-be-marketed Microsoft Surface.