Who could forget the infamous “map”–in real life, a souped up touch screen–that CNN’s John King used all during the 2008 presidential election to chart the electoral votes state by state. Well, that large screen, multi-touch display, made by a company called Perceptive Pixel, is now available in a 27-inch format aimed at CAD users, among other professionals, to deliver a more productive (and let’s face it, way cooler) way of working.
As part of its pitch, Perceptive Pixel is promoting the 27-inch display as a redefinition of the personal workstation, allowing users to work directly on screen to access and manipulate complex data like 3-D models and workflows. The unit is powered in part by NVIDIA Quadro GPUs and SDI capture cards and delivers resolutions of 2560×1440 with up to 16.7 million colors in a 27″ diagonal IPS (in-plane switching) LCD panel.
Perceptive Pixel execs claim that true multi-touch capabilities at this smaller scale and fidelity have been technically impossible to pull off. Projected capacitive technology has been widely used in smaller handhelds and slates, but it has been difficult to deploy at larger display sizes or if the sensor glass is placed close to a display because of electrostatic interference from the LCD panel. Manufacturers which have been able to circumvent some of these issues and deliver 24″ diagonals LCD panels have had to distance the sensor glass far away from the display and create a stiff thickness–a design, Perceptive Pixel execs say causes visual quality to suffer while creating a parallax that makes the device unworkable for serious applications.
Enter Perceptive Pixel’s design solution, what it touts as its claim to fame. Company engineers have optically bonded the sensor glass to the display, solving the parallax issue, they say, and with its patented projected capacitive (Pro-Cap) controller technology, it has been able to garner improved touch performance and achieve response times of under 1 millisecond.
Sure, improving personal productivity is nice, but imagine wowing your boss or a customer by exploding your CAD model or extruding a part all with a flick of your finger and no key strokes. Watch out John King!
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