A Different Kind of Tabletop Gaming - Coffee Table Competition
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If something sounds vaguely familiar about this table, it could be because Mitsubishi wasn’t the first company to come up with it. When HP Labs celebrated its fortieth anniversary in late February, it held an open house and took advantage of the opportunity to show off a number of projects it had in the works. One of them was a coffee table married to a tablet PC that sounds very much like the one Mitsubishi showcased.
The table project is named Misto. According to Pere Obrador, project manager in HP’s imaging technology department, the table would let a group of people sit around it to look over a map, share photos, or play board games. These are things we can do right now, of course, but Misto would allow it to be done in a digital format, with all the benefits you gain from getting a computer involved (such as saving the results of what you did).
Misto doesn’t seem to apply the same kind of recognition of individual users that Mitsubishi’s DiamondTouch does. It does feature specialized software to handle the interface. As of this writing, I couldn’t find any further information about Misto at HP’s website.
So, can we expect to see a DiamondTouch or Misto coffee table under our trees this Christmas? Sad to say, it seems rather doubtful. On the other hand, I wouldn’t count it as impossible about five years from now. Who knows? Mitsubishi has already suggested that touch panels could be set up in kindergartens for virtual finger painting. If the screens get cheap and durable enough for those kinds of activities, I can’t see it being very long before we’re scrambling to be the first ones on our block with coffee tables that can play Doom, Quake, and just about any other game you can imagine.
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