I was over at the GTC Emerging Companies summit yesterday. I saw this device called zspace. I will do my best to try and describe it. I believe it is just a monitor with a couple of motion sensor cameras which capture your movement via registration points on a pair of glasses. It gives your brain the illusion the monitor is a shadow box, and there are items inside that you can manipulate with a stylus. The objects are holographic in nature. So you can rotate them and take them apart.
One of the demos was a beating heart. When you dissected the heart you could feel it beating through the pen stylus. It was really pretty realistic looking and feeling. You can also place objects in motion.
These are 3D images. That's why it looks blurry.
The product is so hard to describe I think I'm going to try and make their developer conference so I can get a second chance at it.
I keep waiting for one of the board game makers to use these sorts of tablets for their board games. Even beyond all of the cool extra features that you could add, just being able to save a game like Axis & Allies would mean that you wouldn't have to play in marathon sessions. If you stuck one in a cocktail table and created support for moving the pieces by touch, it would be a hit with more mainstream casual players.
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