When Apple brought multitouch to the masses, it was heralded as one of the greatest innovations in years. Everyone is racing to catch Apple, and its ability to provide intuitive, simple user interfaces relying on touch. However, once you get over the gloss and shine, all Apple really did was build a very good interface… multitouch was only icing on the cake, but certainly not the secret ingredient.

The iPhone has only just recently celebrated its first birthday, but already the progress on the “next big thing” is racing ahead in full gear. Take a look at the following take on a “Minority Report” type interface… makes the iPhone look darn right antique!

We have been developing a new software for tracking and object handling in vvvv. We started from scratch due to performance issues and now the system is reactive and fast – just the way we always wanted it to be. David Dessens did a great job there! Still, there are a couple of issues to be solved. We’ve tested and prototyped some applications, like a memory, a media browser, a synthesizer, and of course abstract touch-sensitive visuals are always great fun to play with.

This video shows the current Work-In-Progress (next time in HDV again, this is plain DV quality):

Multi-Touch Interface Research » An update of our Work-In-Progress.

Multi-Touch – Work in Progress from Andreas Koller (Strukt) on Vimeo.

What better way to do market research than to ask students for their input on what they consider are important aspects of computers. Lenovo employed two interns over the summer who were very familiar with tabletPC’s and education. They created a head-to-head video comparison between their HP tablet and the Lenovo X61t. Being a tabletPC user in the education space myself, I have to agree with everything they say. There are parts where it does sound like a propaganda video for Lenovo but the students’ comments reflect real-world accounts of what OEM’s need to keep in mind when designing their next crop of tablets.

GottaBeMobile – Students Discuss Basic Needs For Tablets : Tablet PC & Mobile PC News & Video Reviews, and Tablet PC Forums.

For those of you new to the world of multi-touch, a list like this gives you a pretty good recap of where this new technology is taking us.

Well, thanks to the good people at Autodesk, a high resolution DVD image is now available. It is fairly large (119MB), but if you wanted to show off the multi-touch goodness in a presentation or meeting, now you can.

Download the ISO here.

This is but one of several videos showing what the NUI-box can do. The NUI Group should be commended for their work on this project. It is great to see a device that is actually allowing multiple people to do multiple different things. The future looks bright.

The presentation took place at TED: Ideas Worth Spreading