Autodesk post Fluid for Jesus Phone

Everyone except me has an iPhone it seems (yup, I love my blackberry to death. its own death usually) and I've finally got an excuse to get one, or at least an iPod Touch. Autodesk has just released its first (as far as I'm aware) foray into the world of the multi-touch device. Yes, it has been demoing all manner of large scale multitouch goodness for some times, but this is the first demo that's available for a decent, consumer level product. If you've got an enabled device, look here or more details are here.

This technology has been around for some time, but this is still very very cool. Its a fluid simulate, activated and interacted with by multi-touch. What I really want is a motion and multi-touch senstive version of the Chameleon.

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Microsoft Touch Screen TouchWall

Seems like Josh over at SolidSmack.com got to it first, but this looks sweet. Its a hacked together rear projection unit with some fancy bits and bobs running on Vista. What's interesting is the multi-touch manner. A lot of the CAD vendors are talking about this as the future - SolidWorks went multi-touch crazy at their press event preceding the last SolidWorks World. I wonder how it could be packaged up - maybe some sort of hand held device like the Wacom's Cintiq maybe. One thing's for sure, we all ain't gonna be standing in front of a wall to get the job done are we?

As a recent convert to the Apple platform and owner of a macbook air, I have to say multi touch is pretty compelling - as this technology develops, its going to be interesting to see how its implemented in CAD systems. Of course, most of my work is done on a big old workstation running windows, but I do my writing on OSX.. but if I do fancy designing something, I now have the early test version of Rhino for the Mac - and that has multi-touch implemented in a very subtle manner.

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