CNN Using Multi-Touch Screens

Category: Screens

Multitouch screens are catching on beyond the iPhone and iPod Touch. CNN has licensed Jeff Han’s Multi-touch technology for their new interactive displays to bring visual clarity to viewers about the network’s political coverage of the caucuses and primaries. Its inventor, Jefferson Han (founder of Perceptive Pixel), calls it the “Multi-touch Collaboration Wall”. The interactive wall allows multiple people to interact with real-time data and on-screen elements simultaneously - photos, videos, Google Earth maps, live streams of Web sites, charts, etc…

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]