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Multitouch pioneer Jazzmutant / Stantum makes cocky three finger pan from past to future of input
Before the iPhone, Microsoft Surface or even Jeff Han's famous 2006 demonstration at TED, a commercial multitouch display already existed. It's a customizable music control surface called the Jazzmutant Lemur, and it dates back to at least 2004. Under the new name Stantum, Jazzmutant's touchscreens continue to impress, and now that its groundbreaking original finally has a potential competitor in the iPad, company co-founder Guillaume Largillier has granted Create Digital Music a sizable interview to comment on the future of the technology. Amidst jabs at Apple for developing a solution only a "Neanderthal" could love, the co-founder hints that the $2000 Lemur might finally see a price drop, and that the company's decided to license their tech to other multitouch tablet manufacturers. Be sure to bring your table salt before hitting our source link, as the second half of the piece is an editorial very much in Stantum's favor, but you might hold off on the full pinch -- it's a pretty good read nonetheless.
Jazzmutant's multitouch tablet works with a stylus as well
The Jazzmutant folks have been doing multitouch since way before it was in vogue, with patents reaching back to 2004 and some nifty tech to back it up. They spend most of their time on the Lemur and Dexter media control surfaces, but they've been playing around with Tablet PCs, and their first prototype is a beauty. The main advantage of the tech is that it not only can handle unlimited points of contact, so you interact with your apps using as many fingers as you'd like, but it can also accept simultaneous Tablet PC pen input, with precision and pressure sensitivity to boot. They've got the tech retrofitted on a 12-inch Fujitsu tablet at the moment, which they showed off last week at the Siggraph Emerging Tech conference in San Diego. Things are a bit bulky at the moment, but hopefully the tech -- which can be scaled from portable devices to 60-inch LCDs without breaking a sweat -- will be finding its way into real tablets before long. The video is after the break.
