Multi-touch interfaces - now and a vision from the past

We're involved in some interesting projects applying multitouch to the design of new control systems - hopefully we'll be able to post something on these soon.  But in the meantime we thought it was interesting to compare one of the current systems - Microsoft Surface...

...with this video we came across of a long forgotten idea from Sun in 1994 for future systems called Starfire.

 

It's a big desk but there's lots there that isn't a million miles away - touch interaction, video-conferencing, instant messaging, collaborative working environments on documents, scanning & embedded information into other media, 3D modelling and texture mapping, etc.  Maybe we still have some way to go on voice control & telepresence.