TouchTable and Geography

There was an interesting piece on PBS's Wired Science on the TouchTable...a cross between a SmartBoard, a Tablet PC and a coffee table. Thank you, Matthew, for clueing me into this. Claimed to be designed to teach kids about geography, the demonstration of the TouchTable was using Google Earth (love that) and then they switced to the "really cutting edge virtual globe," ArcGIS Explorer. Hum. Sounds like a suspicious link to ESRI. It is a pretty good bit of neo-geography, though, but at $59,000 per TouchTable, seems a far stretch for most regular people to ever afford one.



Then there was an additional link on the PBS site to a TouchTable demo video clip from the ESRI 2005 Users Conference, where the demo guy takes us to Las Vegas using ArcGIS Explorer, which must have been in development back then. This video is a really cool sandwiching of two geo-geeks and lets you know what you're missing when you DON'T make it to the conference. But then there's Derek, who comes on at about 3 1/2 minutes into the demo and you get to see something you might actually be able to do in your own lifetime...Derek demos using a tablet PC and "ArcGIS Server Smart Client Framework" to do GIS. Nice.