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Cynergy's magazine kiosk concept serves up digital content a la carte (video)
Not that we've never seen Surface-like touch tables interacting with mobile devices before, but now that the whole thing is being repackaged as "the magazine stand of the future" and those trendy tablets are involved, we might as well have a look. Cynergy is demonstrating a seamless method for purchasing digital content from one of these kiosks using your e-reader or tablet pc. It's just a matter of plopping your device -- which already knows your identity and available credit -- atop the display table and then flicking the particular magazine or newspaper you want onto your storage. It looks effortless and all, but it also requires that you have the "custom designed and built" software from Cynergy, which you'll have to pump funds into in order to get the seamlessness going. We don't know how we feel about yet another proprietary ecosystem floating about, but you can make your own mind up after watching the video after the break.
Let your fingers do the manipulating
Forget Wii parties: the hot new trend is creating a 3D interface that you can manipulate with your fingers via the Wii. We can only guess that Minority Report, Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, and other media are heavily influencing people who want their virtual interfaces right now and see the Wii as a path to the future. Using our new hero Johnny Lee's efforts as a springboard, the guys at Cynergy Labs took the interactive interface and ran with it. With infrared gloves and a Wii remote, a picture is disassembled, reassembled, and moved around on the screen before our very eyes -- and everything is manipulated in mid-air, no actual touching required. The gloves allow for a more delicate (and accurate) range of movements, as is demonstrated later in the video, as they pair the set-up with an interface similar to Microsoft Surface for a distance-enhanced multi-touch experience.All we can say is: move over, robots. We've got to get busy welcoming our new fingertip overlords.
Wiimote re-purposed for glove-based multi-touch system
Our new hero Johnny Chung Lee has already put the Wiimote to use for various multi-touch and multi-point systems (not to mention head-tracking), but it looks like others are slowly starting to follow in his footsteps, and the folks at Cynergy Labs have now produced one of the most polished "hacks" to date. Dubbed Project Maestro, the setup is built upon Microsoft's Windows Presentation System (or WPF) and uses a pair of Minority Report-style IR gloves to give you "multi-touch at a distance." That, as you can see in the video after the break, allows for an interface not unlike Microsoft's Surface -- without the "surface," of course. Unlike Johnny Lee's projects, however, the goods behind this one aren't available to the public just yet (for free or otherwise), but hopefully that'll change before too long.[Thanks, Henry]
