In a world first, Illusion Labs shows off their commercial games running on a big screen multi-touch table.

The smash hit games Touchgrind and Sway have previously proven themselves in a smaller format on the iPhone with hundreds of thousands copies sold.

“Multi-touch adds a whole new dimension to gaming when used properly” says Carl Loodberg, CEO at Illusion Labs, and continues “Our focus at Illusion Labs is
creating innovative games and applications with novel interaction that will WOW the audience”.

In this video we show our games on a platform by Touchtech in cooperation with Crowd. The games run on any multi-touch hardware, including mobile devices, multi-touch laptops and large window displays.

About Touchgrind

Touchgrind brings skateboarding to your fingertips using innovative multi-touch controls. The board is controlled by moving the fingers on the screen just as a real skater moves his legs.

Released last November, Touchgrind has become one of the most popular commercial games on the Apple App Store, never dropping below top 40 on the US top list since its release.

About Sway

Swing and sway through beautiful worlds in this rag doll physics simulation using finger gestures to control the creatures’ little grabby hands.

Fresh on the Apple App Store, Sway has already been top rated and is a favorite of many avid players.

About Illusion Labs

Illusion Labs specializes in WOW factor games and applications. They combine engineering and aesthetics to create fun and appealing pieces of work. Some of their strongest sides are graphics, physics simulation, and novel interaction such as accelerometer and multi-touch.

Illusion Labs was founded in 2007 by Andreas Alptun and Carl Loodberg and is located in Malmö, Sweden.

Use two fingers to scroll up and down a page or a window. Pinch to zoom in and out in Safari, Preview, iPhoto, the Finder and even Photoshop CS4. Swipe the trackpad with three fingers together to go back and forth in your browser or navigate between photos in iPhoto and Preview apps. Rotate to adjust an image with your fingertips or use the new four-finger swipe gesture: up and down to access Exposé modes, left or right to switch between open applications. You can also right-click with two fingers or configure a right-click area anywhere on the spacious trackpad to access shortcut menus.

The new improved Multi-Touch trackpad feels as good as it functions and the more you use it, the more you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it. Apple designers and software engineers have spent a considerable amount of time working on the sensitivity, audio feedback and friction of the trackpad. They incorporated these great new Multi-Touch gestures and the result of all these efforts is one of the largest, and most ergonomic MacBook trackpad ever. With the breakthrough aluminum unibody enclosure and stunning LED-backlit displays, these new notebooks are truly spectacular!

3G technology means 2.8X faster data downloads than EDGE, which is perfect for Safari and Mail over cellular networks around the world because it’s now almost approaching Wi-Fi speeds. 3G is also multitask so you can talk on the phone while checking your email, surfing the web or using Google Maps.

GPS support is now integrated into the iPhone so you can use Google maps to find your location, get directions, and see traffic via GPS or by triangulating your position using Wi-Fi and cellular towers.

Now you can flip through photos, pinch, swipe, or rotate to enlarge text using just your fingers. The Multi-Touch technology from iPhone, iPod touch, and MacBook Air now comes standard to all Apple’s high-end laptops in an amazing Multi-Touch trackpad. The size of the trackpad seems to be the same as before even though it has multi-touch.

These documents show the use of various combinations of fingers being applied to the specific Mac OS X interface (gestures for Expose and Dashboard). Clearly, Apple is working on new gestures using more fingers and combinations to expand the basic multi-touch functionality of the iPhone and the MacBook Air for upcoming versions of Mac OS X and new hardware products.

[Via Macrumors]

It’s the same technology we have on the iPhone but it’s being used on a large screen and with more than two fingers. “Think of it as a giant iPhone with a hundred fingers on it” said David Bohrman, CNN’s vice president and Washington, D.C., bureau chief. Bohrman first saw the Multi-Touch technology demonstrated at the TED 2006 conference and recognized its potential for election coverage. CNN plans to employ the display for other types of coverage. “It has enormous capabilities,” Bohrman said. “We will be using it a lot over the next year.” Jeff Han says: “Once the election calms down, you can see how this might work for other kinds of news, like financial, weather or sports.”

The cable network unveiled “The Magic Wall” in early January for the Iowa caucuses to analyze and break down results. CNN has used it to cover Super Tuesday and for every primary contest since. In The Situation Room, John King was zooming in and out of electoral maps by pinching together or spreading apart fingertips on this oversize multi-touch screen, as many of us now zoom-in on Google Maps with the iPhone. King shrunk one graphic by making a pinching motion around its borders; he made another expand by drawing his fingers apart, exactly like the gestures used to manipulate the photos on an iPhone. He was also grabbing and dragging graphic elements to position pie charts around the screen at will.

[Via Washington Post]

Get the 32GB iPod touch for only $494 + Free Shipping.

You may be familiar with trackpad gestures on MacBook and MacBook Pro such as two finger tapping for a secondary click and two fingers scrolling. MacBook Air now allows you to pinch, swipe and rotate so you can navigate your applications more efficiently.

You can use pinch to zoom in and out. It works right in coverflow in the finder. You simply place two fingers on the trackpad – your thumb and forefinger work best – and drag them outward while keeping contact with the trackpad. With pinch you can easily switch between a larger icon view and a text view.

It works with Safari too. if you get to a page with small text, just pinch to increase the font to a more readable size. To move back and forth through web pages, instead of hitting the forward and back buttons, you can use another gesture called “Swipe”. Just use three fingers together. To page forward, swipe from left to right. To page backwards, swipe from right to left.

These gestures work in iPhoto too. You can pinch to get a closer look at a shot and swipe to move through a photo slideshow. You can also use a gesture to rotate photos. All you do is select the photo, place to fingers on the trackpad and rotate your fingers.

Those are just a few of the things you can do with trackpad gestures. The system preferences on MacBook Air has demos on how to use them.