Another few corrections:

The student’s name is JONATHAN Jarvis rather than Jeffery. In regard to the table, it is fully multi-touch — not sure what was meant by responding serially — so as many touches and people who want to touch can at the same time. The roundness of the table is especially conducive to this kind of collaborative interaction.

This first round of multi touch table experiments was to get a feel for what kinds of interactions work well in this new medium, in particular looking beyond the overdone stretch-and-rotate-a-photo examples that are endlessly done on multitouch systems. For a view of some of the experiments, look here:

We’ll be posting more in the near future, and you can find them on my site:

http://people.artcenter.edu/~vanallen/

Our next direction is to see how multitouch tables can be used for real applications, in particular exploring and collaborating on complex information spaces (again, hopefully something more interesting than pushing photos around a screen). The technology for all of this is well in the pipeline — e.g. see what Moto Development (the company that developed this table) is working on here — 3D multitouch sensing:

http://labs.moto.com/touch-screen/home

But in many ways, the harder questions are what is it good for, and how can we make really rich interactions?

– Phil van Allen