Ideum mt2 Table is very cool!

Posted by: Richard Monson-Haefel on 02/04/2009

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.

Richard Monson-Haefel's complete blog can be found at: http://rmh.blogs.com

About Richard Monson-Haefel

Richard Monson-Haefel is the author of 97 Things Every Software Architect Should know (O'Reilly), Enterprise JavaBeans (O'Reilly), Java Message Service (O'Reilly), J2EE Web Services (Addison-Wesley), and one of the world's leading experts and book authors on enterprise computing. He was the lead architect of OpenEJB, an open source EJB container used in Apache Geronimo, a member of the JCP Executive Committee, member of JCP EJB expert groups, and an industry analyst for Burton Group researching enterprise computing, open source, and Rich Internet Application (RIA) development. Today, Richard is an independent software developer. You can learn more about Richard at his web site http://www.monson-haefel.com

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