The future fair keeps getting closer and closer these days. Not only do we have iPhones with FaceTime–which, when combined with the iPod Nano (as I’m obvious they will be before too long) will near aesthetic conclude to creating a mass-market version of Dick Tracy’s 2-way wrist TV–we’ve also got robot cars and, ahem, robot journalists (which I’m trying to support at bay by design of this terribly sophisticated and never-ending sentence–apparently the roboscribes have difficulty with such Proustian gymnastics: like a flash! They’re coming for our jobs! Hand me another semicolon and an em accelerate!) .

And too, we’ve got Minority Report-like gesture-driven interfaces and now this: a multiuser touch conceal the size of a desk, which curves up to gain a, well, desktop like the metaphorical one you may be staring at legal now.

frosty!

I realize some of you will scoff at this device–whipped up by The Media Computing Group at Germany’s RWTH Aachen University, and brought to my attention by Engadget–but I freely admit that it fires my imagination.

I can peruse it combined with the type of Wacom pen-and-tablet intention that lets you “intention” directly on cover. As a sometime graphic designer, I’d be in nirvana. I could hunch over in a hard-working, tortured artist kind of blueprint and design a relate or manipulate a Photoshop file, assign a version of it, and then scurry that version across the (horizontal) desktop to contemplate it curve up onto the (vertical) desktop that would now be a perfect bulletin board.
(Credit: Media Computing Group)

I can survey it incorporating the aforementioned gesture-driven technology to allow me to sit aid and point at the drawings on my bulletin board to decide the ones I like: I could snap my fingers, say, and retain those files; then–I don’t know–dismiss the rejects with a disdainful backhanded wave and examine them burst into unbelievably lifelike flames courtesy of a supercharged graphics card or an up-and-coming 3D Web technology like WebGL. A client meeting was never so worthy fun! It’s a multiuser device: I could area the client’s current drawings ablaze, and she could ignite mine! We could produce a modern videogame! I’d let her acquire! I’d have to! She’s now my only source of income–my journalism job having been stolen by R2-D2!

But enough of my overheated holiday-weekend imaginings; irrelevant asides about robots; and expressionless, monotonous, tiresome–tiresome–syntactical pyrotechnics. Why don’t you purchase a peruse at the video and section with us your hold gleaming vaporware in the comments part below?

(And, yes, I know, we’ve already had at least one real-life interpretation of the Dick Tracy gadget–and for a long time now. gape? I told you the future impartial keeps getting closer. So cessation it’s become the past. Feel free to point out if and where the technology mashup I’ve conjured already exists–and when it appeared.)