TouchWall Seemingly Brings the "Minority Report" UI to Life

Remember Minority Report? The Tom Cruise movie, based on a Philip K. Dick short story, with one of the cool things being able to interface with a computer using gestures only? Microsoft's Surface seems to be a tabletop version of that interface, but during his keynote Wednesday at the CEO Summit, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates showed off TouchWall, a 4-foot-by-6-foot touch-screen computer prototype which reminds me of nothing less than that same Minority Report UI.

Of course, unlike the Minority Report interface, TouchWall isn't virtual. It's ... well, a wall. At the same time, you'd thinkTouchWall would be more expensive than Surface, but while Surface is a multi-touch and vision system that uses cameras to sense what is on the table, reacting differently depending on the object, TouchWall is more like having a touchscreen interface on a wall - hence the name.

Surface runs about $10,000, but according to Microsoft, TouchWall could be used to turn any surface into a touch-sensitive UI for mere hundreds of dollars.

Of course, while Surface recently went live in AT&T stores, TouchWall is very new. "Whenever I go up and touch it, the software will notice it," Gates said, in his demo. Nothing happened, he so he added the qualifier "theoretically."