World's Biggest Touch Screen Spans 82 Inches

CREDIT: Perceptive Pixel View full size image

VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- While the rest of the world works to shrink their touch screens onto ever-smaller digital devices, the multitouch pioneers at Perceptive Pixel have gone in the opposite direction. Behold, the world's largest touch screen. Measuring an epic 82 inches, this projected capacitive display tests the limits of current LCD technology, and provides a massive workspace for collaborative creation.

Despite its epic measurements, the screen sports a lithe six inches of depth, making it the perfect wall mount for impressive presentations or group projects. Make no mistake, this is for professionals only. The demonstrations here at the SIGGRAPH interactive technology conference highlighted giant maps, artistic rendering and military intelligence videos.

We made the projective capacitive technology to deal with the larger sizes, but we think of it as a refurbishment of our entire line of projects. The technology works with multitouch on any size," said Jeff Han, founder and chief scientist at Perceptive Pixel. "82 inches is the biggest LCD panel on the market today. As soon as they make a bigger one, we will use it."

The giant screen comes out just as Perceptive Pixel looks to pivot its product focus. So far, the large touch screens have primarily found a home in offices or on TV as a presentation tool. For example, Perceptive Pixel considers the 2004 election, when John King used one of their screens to detail election results, as their breakthrough moment.

Moving forward, Perceptive Pixel hopes its large scale touch screen panels will serve as the collaborative centerpiece in business environments populated with an entire ecosystem of task specific devices, Han told InnovationNewsDaily. In the future, Han imagines workers communally, and simultaneously, using the touch screens like they use white boards today, before transferring the work back to personal workstations.

All of which is not to say that the 82 inch screen doesn't work well as a presentation device. It is nothing if not impressive, with clear colors, sharp resolution and an intuitive software package that really gives both the user and the onlooker a feeling of living in the future.

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