You’ll recall Tom Cruise grabbing air and moving images around on a giant screen in DreamWorks SKG’s "Minority Report".
Now, Jefferson Han hopes to sell DreamWorks and other Hollywood studios on the real McCoy: a 16-foot long giant touch-screen that lets a group of people similtaneously manipulate images and videos, perform searches, draw and cut with their fingers. Han says he’s held talks with DreamWorks, among others, about the technology, which sells for $100,000 to $200,000 and runs off a single Dell computer.
"They’re interested in doing storyboarding", says Han, who’s marketing the system through Perceptive Pixel, a company he started last year.
Storyboarding is the process of drawing freeze-frames of movies in production. Digital storyboarding — using a computer to replace paper and pencil — is still in its infancy. Steven Spielberg’s "Minority Report" was one of the first films to employ it.
Han, who developed the multitouch system at NYU, says he’s sold a few of the systems for military applications.
I couldn’t immediately reach a DreamWorks spokesperson.
