The New York Times reports today [http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/16/in-tv-race-microsoft-has-lead-forrester-says] that television is emerging as a crucial strategic platform, "every bit as intense as... mobile." Apple, Google, and Microsoft (and others? Amazon? Facebook?) will vie for dominance. I argue that making all involved surfaces -- the large TV, the smaller phone and tablet -- interactive, with multi-touch, will become essential ground for television as platform. As the platforms fully open for development, with App stores, things will get interesting. ZeroTouch is the highest performance, most cost effective way to make the TV surface interactive. When production of the technology is scaled, costs should run in the hundreds of dollars for very large screens. The ACM CHI Austin ZeroTouch demo showed how responsive ZeroTouch sensing is, at television scale.

Kinect's specialty is its depth camera. ZeroTouch's specialty is extremely precise and fast sensing in a plane. Kinect cannot presently match ZeroTouch for precision and speed for free-air interaction. ZeroTouch presently can sense precisely only in a single plane. Hence, we are working to combine the two sensing modalities to create the highest fidelity free-air interaction.

Sun developed the first industrial strength version of unix, that is, the first one widely used that was reliable. They also created the first really usable workstation -- like a PC, but with really good networking and (for those days) decent graphics. They created the first network file system. RIP.