Microsoft showed off a new product dubbed “TouchWall” at its CEO Summit in Redmond, Wash. today. As the name suggests, the product is an electronic whiteboard that you can control with a sweep of your hand.

The technology resembles the Microsoft Surface electronic tables that the company recently started deploying in AT&T stores. But it’s much different in design. The Surface tables use a computer, a multi-touch display, and several cameras to project an image on the table that you can manipulate with your hands. It costs around $10,000 now and will be some time before it gets into homes. The TouchWall, on the other hand, costs maybe hundreds of dollars and is simpler, according to TechCrunch.

I played around with the Surface applications during the Consumer Electronics Show in January and they are a lot of fun. You can basically get rid of the mouse and keyboard and control a computer with the sweep of your hands or tapping with your fingers. TouchWall seems like a similar approach. You can zoom in and out using your fingers, play media, or draw on the entire screen. It’s another product that shows multi-touch screens — the same kind used in the iPhone — are going to have a bright future.

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  1. May 23rd, 2008
    7:00 am

    Microsoft’s Silicon Valley Road Show: affordable surface computing, programming for kids and more » VentureBeat said:

    [...] LaserTouch also powers TouchWall, the surface computing whiteboard that Microsoft unveiled last week. [...]

  2. June 7th, 2008
    5:54 am

    Kansei 2008 online | WebQuatro - cztery strony świata Web said:

    [...] Microsoft shows off TouchWall at CEO Summit [via Zemanta] [...]

  3. June 30th, 2008
    1:53 pm

    Is Apple working on an iPhone with a physical keyboard? I hope not. » VentureBeat said:

    [...] keyboard is dying a slow death. As computers become more like Microsoft’s Surface or the rumored multi-touch tablets Apple is working on, one day the thought of having this big, [...]

  4. Leaving Las Vegas: Microsoft Surface branches out to Sheraton hotels » VentureBeat said:

    [...] is another, more affordable technology Microsoft is working on called LaserTouch. It powers the TouchWall, which Microsoft showed off in May and could become a candidate for a multi-touch computing experience in the [...]