Ideum, a company that develops computer and web exhibits for museums, announced today that they have released their own large multi-touch table, the mt² Table.

With screen 50" diagonal screem the mt² is significantly larger than Microsoft Surface (30" diagonal). It also offers higher resolutions, 1280 x 720 compared to Microsoft Surface's 1024 x 768, and it looks really cool to boot!

What I really like about the Ideum mt² Table is that it uses the NUI Suite 1.0 Snowflake gesture recognition system which supports the TUIO protocol and can therefore be programmed in several languages including Adobe ActionScript 3 (Flash), Java, C#, C/C++ and even Python. I would love to write a multi-touch application in Flash!

The table also comes with preinstalled software including multi-media viewer, an implementation of Google Earth, a 3D model render, and a few other things. It looks great except for the life of the bulb which is 3,000 hours compared to 6,000 hours for the Surface (projections bulbs are expensive). I'm not sure what the pricing or availability is yet - I'll update this post when I find out.