CNN’s interactive touch-screens: cool, but not quite ready for primetime?
CNN’s election coverage is boasting some cool new technologies—specifically the new “Magic Wall”, an interactive Touch-screen provided on Jeff Han’s Perceptive Pixel multi-touch technology. According to this article from Broadcast Engineering, Perceptive Pixel developers created customized software for use during the election coverage.
CNN reporters have been using the Magic Wall to toggle between screen views and zoom-in on data sets. During the Iowa coverage, they also had a slick “delegate-sorting” interface. Last night, one reporter used the multi-touch resizing to show some campaign picture. Overall…very cool stuff and, like any design geek, I can’t wait to get my hands on one those (although I hear they go for a cool $100,000.00).
As they cool as the screens are, watching a reporter interact with them feels broken – there’s an unevenness watching them work with the device that doesn’t translate well to TV coverage. The screens also create some challenging body positioning issues. Reporters have to face away from the camera to interact with screens, creating some choppy communications. This is similar to some of the problems people have when presenting projected PowerPoint presentations.
All in all, it’s great to see nifty new technologies like multi-touch interfaces being put to practical use, but there are some clear kinks that need to be worked out…
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[...] couple of weeks ago I posted about CNN’s use of the Perceptive Pixel’s magic wall. The Wall has created quite a buzz among interaction design geeks and there’s been quite a [...]
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