Read this review over the weekend and was really impressed by the technology, if not the price tag:
"The folks over at the Media Interaction Lab have taken on the complex task of designing a usable interface for one of those fancy multi-touch coffee tables; their response to the challenge was quite simple: if you're virtually controlling the devices in your home, shouldn't it seem a lot like when you control them in real-life? Makes sense to me. This simply brilliant yet brilliantly simple idea is being manifested in the Media Interaction Lab's CRISTAL project. Similar in hardware design to the Microsoft Surface, CRISTAL uses a large multi-touch display, generally the size of a small coffee or book table. The main interface, however, differs in paradigm completely. Where most multi-touch user interfaces today consist of a "virtual desktop," CRISTAL's interface literally puts a live image of your living room on the screen, by means of a wall-mounted or ceiling-mounted camera. The camera view (which hopefully has all your controllable electronics in sight) gives users a projection of their real room to interact with; one of the examples shown in MI-Lab's video demonstrates the user controlling the lights in his room by simply touching the image of the light on the table and dragging his finger to control the brightness. Another user also controls the movie playing by tapping his TV to get a DVD menu right at his fingertips.
CRISTAL's not production-ready yet, and like the Surface, it's not going to be cheap. But, you have to admit, it sure is cool. Check out MI-Lab's videos to see just how cool it is."
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