Make your own Map Table and more
This touch-sensitive LCD should have what you need to run Google Earth on a map table. The specs even support multi-touch, support for which the GE team could probably add.
The idea behind the main GE navigation mode now is that the mouse is your finger on the virtual globe. Wherever you touch and drag, the earth moves under your finger, keeping that spot locked due to virtual friction. "Throwing" the earth is meant to feel like spinning a model globe and letting it go. The throw is intentionally dampened to make the earth feel heavy.
It all works by computing a spherical interpolation between where, in 3D earth coordinates, you touched last frame and this frame. For two or more fingers, you’d do much the same thing, except you have to allow zoom and rotation to change to keep both fingers (or hands) locked to their respective spots on the globe, essentially solving the set of vectors in spherical space for the optimal zoom and rotation to keep the fingers planted.
It’s something I would have gladly put in there if the hardware had been available at the time. The experimental prototypes of two-fingered or two-handed touch I’ve seen are somewhat limited in that they’re telling GE to zoom x% or rotate y degrees without having access to the internal vectors, before the auto-piloting moves you around in those nice sweeping arcs. It would work better if GE did the math itself, or allowed a UI plug-in DLL to drive the app. [Update: here's a video of a map table using multi-touch that shows the benefits and some of the drawbacks of adding this interface without augmenting the GE navigation code]
Beyond this obvious use, what I expect to see for better office work-flow is a combination of two monitors, one horizontal one like this (though ideally 3D) will be your literal desktop. A 2nd vertical screen (mounted ideally at eye level) would be there for any detail work, like word processing. This way, you can both use full vertical screen for your main task and have the things that compete for your attention (applets, icons, documents, etc..) on the lower screen ready to go, the way things tend to pile on our desks (see Bump Top interface for ideas). The keyboard could be virtual, drawn on the bottom screen. But I’d still prefer a physical keyboard just above my legs to prevent arm injuries.
And for home, they’re already anticipating the electronic coffee table, pre-loaded for social gaming. This screen claims to be ready for even hosting gaming using miniatures, ala AD&D. How scratch-proof and spill-proof is it, I wonder?
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