Jefferson Han, a pale, bespectacled engineer dressed in Manhattan blackness, faced the thousand or so attendees on the first day of TED 2006, the annual technology, amusement, and design conference in Monterey, California. The 30-year-old was petty more than than a curiosity at the confab, where, as its advertisement copy goes, "the world's leading thinkers and doers assemble to observe inspiration." And on that day, the thinkers and doers included Google gazillionaires Sergey Brin and Larry Page, east-tail amazon Jeff Bezos, and Bill Joy, who helped code Sun Microsystems from scratch. Titans of engineering science. Information technology was enough to make anyone experience a bit minor.

And so Han began his presentation. His fingertips splayed, he placed them on the cobalt blue 36-inch-broad display before him and traced playful, wavy lines that were projected onto a behemothic screen at his back. He conjured upwardly a lava lamp and sculpted floating blobs that changed color and shape based on how hard he pressed. ("Google should take something like this in their entrance hall," he joked.) With the crowd get-go to stir, he called up some vacation photos, manipulating them on the monitor equally if they were bodily prints on a tabletop. He expanded and shrank each prototype by pulling his two alphabetize fingers apart or bringing them together. A few oohs and aahs bubbled up from the floor.

Suppressing a smile, Han told the assembled brain trust that he rejects the idea that "we are going to introduce a whole new generation of people to computing with the standard keyboard, mouse, and Windows pointer interface." Scattering and collecting photos like so many playing cards, he added, "This is really the way nosotros should exist interacting with the machines." Adulation rippled through the room. Someone whistled. Han began to feel a fiddling bigger.

But he was far from finished. Han pulled up a two-dimensional keyboard that floated slowly across the screen. "At that place is no reason in this day and age that we should exist conforming to a concrete device," he said. "These interfaces should kickoff conforming to united states." He tapped the screen to produce dozens of fuzzy white assurance, which bounced around a playing field he defined with a moving ridge of the mitt. A pic of a finger pulled downward a mountainous mural derived from satellite data, and Han began flying through it, using his fingertips to swoop down from a global perspective to a continental one, until finally he was zipping through narrow slot canyons similar someone on an Xbox. He rotated his hands similar a clock'due south, tilting the entire field of view on its axis–an F16 in a butt coil. He ended his 9-minute presentation by drawing a puppet, which he made dance with ii fingers.

He basked in the rock-star applause. This is the best kind of affirmation, he idea. The moment you live for.

Half dozen months later, afterwards TED posted the video on its Web site, the blogosphere got air current of Han's presentation. Word spread virally through thousands of bloggers, who either posted the video on their sites or pointed to information technology on YouTube, where it was downloaded a quarter of a 1000000 times. "Uaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhwwwwwwwwwwwllllllllll I want 1!!!" whined one YouTuber. "Just tell me where to buy 1," said some other. "Holy s–t. This is the future," cried a third. Han's presentation became one of YouTube'southward nearly popular tech videos of all time.

In this Googly age, it only takes a random genius or two to conceive of a technology so powerful that it can plow under the mural and remake it in its own image. People are already betting that Jeff Han is one of them. (For an sectional look at a new demo video, see Related Content at right.)

For as long every bit he tin can call up, Han, a inquiry scientist working out of New York University'south Courant Establish, has been fascinated by technology. He even doodles in right angles, rectangles, and squares–hieroglyphs that look almost like circuitry, a schematic of his unconscious. The son of eye-grade Korean immigrants who emigrated to America in the 1970s to accept over a Jewish cafeteria in Queens, Han began taking autonomously the family unit TV, VCR, "anything that was blinking," at the age of 5 (he all the same has a nasty scar courtesy of a hot soldering iron his little sister knocked onto his foot). His male parent wasn't always happy almost the houseful of one-half-reassembled appliances, merely encouraged his son's technolust all the same, and even made him memorize his multiplication tables before he enrolled in kindergarten. At summer camp, Jeff hot-wired golf carts for nocturnal joy rides and fixed boyfriend campers' busted Walkmen in exchange for soda pop. He studied violin "like any practiced Asian kid." He was 12 when he congenital his kickoff laser.

His parents scrimped and saved to send him to the Dalton School, an elite private high schoolhouse on Manhattan's Upper East Side, and then Cornell University, where he studied electrical engineering and calculator scientific discipline. Han skipped out on his senior yr without graduating to join a startup that bought a videoconferencing engineering science he developed while a educatee. A decade later, he'due south poised to change the face of calculating.

Until now, the affect screen has been limited to the uninspiring sort establish at an ATM or an airport ticket kiosk–basically screens with electronic buttons that recognize one finger at a time. Han'southward touch display, by dissimilarity, redefines the mode commands are given to a calculator: Information technology uses both move and pressure–from multiple inputs, whether 2 fingers or xx–to convey information to the silicon brain under the display. Already, industries and companies as various as defence contractor Lockheed Martin, CBS News, Pixar, and unnameable government intelligence agencies take approached Han to go agree of his invention. And, no surprise, he has formed a startup visitor to market information technology, Perceptive Pixel.

"Affect is one of the most intuitive things in the world," Han says. "Instead of existence one step removed, like you are with a mouse and keyboard, yous accept direct manipulation. It's a completely natural reaction–to encounter an object and want to touch it."

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Han gives me a private demonstration at NYU. The 36-inch-wide drafting table he used at TED has since evolved into a giant screen: ii 8-human foot-by-iii-foot panels. I discover the screen is non only smudge resistant but durable–or equally Han says, "peanut butter–proof," a phrase he didn't invent but liked plenty to co-opt.

In this Googly age, it only takes a random genius to conceive a technology so powerful that it plows nether the landscape and remakes information technology in its ain image.

Han teaches me the one pattern I demand to know–a circular move akin to a proofreader's delete symbol, which brings upward a pie-chart card of applications. I poke at it, and suddenly I'thou within the mapping software, overlooking an arid mountain range. Spread 2 fingers apart, and I'thousand zooming through canyons. Push them together, and I'm skying thousands of feet above. I'm not simply looking at three-dimensional terrain, I'm living in it: I'yard wherever I want to be, instantly, in any scale, hurdling whole ridgelines with a unmarried gesture, or free-falling down to any rooftop in whatever city on earth. This own't no MapQuest. Han's machine is faster–much faster–considering there's nothing between me and the data: no mouse, no cursor, no pull-down windows. It's seamless, immediate, ridiculously easy. No transmission required.

An NYU colleague pokes his head in (Han greets him like he does well-nigh everyone: "Dude!") and tells him that a producer from the Ellen DeGeneres Show called. Han is tickled but declines the invitation to appear. Ever since he became a Web phenomenon, he has been receiving all sorts of offers, come up-ons, lecture requests. An official from SPAWAR, a subdivision of the Navy focused on infinite and naval warfare planning, queried Han nigh collaborating. A producer from CBS News wondered how to make utilize of Han'due south touch screen for special events like ballot coverage. A dance deejay asked if he had a product to spin music at clubs. A teenager asked how he could get a estimator engineer too (answer: "Report math").

Meanwhile, I get back to playing with Han's über tech. "Jesus," I say under my breath. "He's gonna get rich."

Han overhears me and laughs. The idea has occurred to him.

Before reinventing the touch screen, Han was just another dotcom refugee at a crossroads. BoxTop Interactive, an e-services house he worked for in Los Angeles, had just flamed out with everything else (he calls the whole boom-bust era a "bunco of bulls–t"). With his male parent ill, and set up for a change himself, Han returned to New York.

He knew some professors at NYU and, despite his aborted stay at Cornell, landed a research position at the Courant Plant, where he has been for the by iv years. The telescopic of the projects he'due south involved in is a testament to the sheer wattage of his brain. 2 are funded past DARPA, the Defence force Avant-garde Research Projects Agency under the Section of Defense, including one involving visual odometry: Modeling his piece of work on the encephalon of a honeybee, Han has been looking for ways to brand a computer know where it has been and where it is going–part of an effort to build a flying camera that would be able to find its way over long distances. Han has also made it to the second round of a DARPA project to create an democratic robot vehicle that can traverse terrain by learning from its own experiences. The goal: to perfect an unmanned ground combat vehicle that could operate over rough trails, in jungles or desert sand, or weave through heavy traffic every bit if it had a skilled commuter backside the bike. One non-DARPA project involves reflectometry. Han came up with a way to scan materials so they are faithfully reproduced digitally. The process typically requires shining a light on a slice of material, a flag, say, from dozens of different angles, and scanning each one into a computer–a time-consuming proposition. Merely Han developed an elegant shortcut: He built a kaleidoscope with three mirrors that reflect one another. Once a swatch of fabric is inserted, the scope yields 22 reflections mimicking different angles of light. When data from each reflection are scanned, the effect is a flag that can be formed into whatsoever shape–i that looks like it'due south waving in the breeze, with each ripple and each slight shift in lite rendered to a photographic exactitude. The whole process takes a fraction of the time Hollywood's best reckoner animators would need.

Han brought a similarly pragmatic exercise-it-yourself attitude to his study of touch on-screen applied science. When he began looking into the idea, he discovered that a few researchers were working on interactive walls and tabletops, and there were a number of fine art pieces. But that was about it. The concept hadn't avant-garde much from where information technology was in the 1980s, when Bill Buxton, at present a Microsoft researcher, was experimenting with bear on-screen synthesizers. "Most of information technology was designed with toys in listen," Han says, "something you project on-screen like Whack-a-Mole with hand gestures. But they weren't asking themselves what purpose it served. I wanted to create something useful."

Inspiration came in the class of an ordinary drinking glass of h2o. Han noticed when he looked down on the water that light reflected differently in areas where his hand contacted the glass. He remembered that in fiber optics, light bounces on the within of the cable until it emerges from the other finish miles abroad. If the surface was fabricated of glass, and the low-cal was interrupted by, say, a finger, the light wouldn't bounce anymore, information technology would diffuse–some of it would drain into the finger, some would shoot directly down, which was happening with his water drinking glass. Physicists telephone call the principle "frustrated total internal reflection" (it sounds like something your therapist might say).

Han decided to put these errant calorie-free beams to work. It took him merely a few hours to come up with a prototype. "You take to accept skills to build," he says. "You can't exist strictly theoretical. I felt fortunate. I walked into a lab with crude materials and walked out with a usable model."

He did it by retrofitting a piece of clear acrylic and attaching LEDs to the side, which provided the calorie-free source. To the dorsum, he mounted an infrared camera. When Han placed his fingers on the makeshift screen, some calorie-free ricocheted straight down, just equally he thought information technology would, and the photographic camera captured the lite paradigm pixel for pixel. The harder he pressed, the more information the camera captured. Han theorized he could pattern software that would measure the shape and size of each contact and assign a serial of coordinates that defined information technology. In essence, each point of contact became a distinct region on a graph. "It'south similar a thumbprint scanner, diddled up in scale and encapsulating all ten or more fingers. It converts touch on to calorie-free." It could also scale images accordingly, so if he pulled a photo autonomously with two fingers, the epitome would grow.

"People want this technology, and they want information technology bad," says Douglas Edric Stanley, inventor of his own impact-screen "hypertable" and a professor of digital arts at the Aix-en-Provence School of Art in France. "1 thing that excited me nigh Jeff Han's organisation is that because of the infrared low-cal passing horizontally through the image surface itself, it tin can track not merely the position of your manus but also the contact pressure and potentially fifty-fifty the arroyo of your manus to the screen. These are astonishing little details, and pretty much give you everything you would demand to move touchable imagery away from a purely point-and-click logic."

Han began coding software to demonstrate some of the touch on screen's capabilities, running them on a standard Microsoft Windows operating system. Meanwhile, Philip Davidson, an NYU PhD candidate, got excited about the project and quickly became its pb software developer.

The first matter the pair did was to modify NASA World Wind, a free Google Globe–blazon open-source mapping program. (Han figured the military machine would be groovy on anything that works faster, since split up seconds hateful the deviation between life and decease.) So they created the photo manipulator, which lets you upload pictures from Flickr or anywhere else on the Web (information technology can also make 2-D images appear as 3-D). A taxonomy tool makes it a cinch to navigate the illustrated branches of the Linnean classification system, from animals and plants down to every known species, and come across on 1 screen how these families are structured and interrelated. (They are thinking of extending it to genealogy and an analysis of social networks.) Multidimensional graphing and charting help y'all visualize spreadsheet data and move them around from ane point in time to some other, while Shape Sketching lets you lot draw on-screen as hands equally yous can with a pencil on paper–then animate these shapes instantly. Downwards the road, it may exist possible to describe Bart Simpson on-screen and instruct the computer in what y'all want him to do.

"As computers accept get more powerful, figurer graphics take avant-garde to the bespeak where it's possible to create photo-realistic images," Han says. "The bottleneck wasn't, How practise we make pixels prettier? It was, How do we engage with them more than?"

Today'south computers presume you are Napoleon, with your left paw tucked into your adapt," says Nib Buxton, whom Han considers to exist the begetter of the multitouch screen. "But a lot of things are better performed with two hands. Multiple- sensor touch screens bridge the gap between the physical and virtual globe."

Mind you, this doesn't mean impact screens will completely replace the estimator mouse, QWERTY keyboard, or traditional graphic user interface (or GUI) any more than movie theatre made live theater disappear or tv set supplanted radio. Each continues to exercise what it does all-time. Your iPod or cell phone may exist fine for short music videos, but you probably wouldn't want to watch a two-hour picture on information technology. "These media fall into their appropriate niche and are displaced in areas where they are not the best," Buxton says.

Han really doesn't know how his mapping software, photo manipulator, or any of information technology will ultimately be used–these applications are really proofs of concept, not ends in themselves. "When unexpected uses sally that no ane ever idea of, that's when it gets exciting and takes off," says Don Norman, a professor at Northwestern University and author of Emotional Blueprint. Thomas Edison, subsequently all, believed the phonograph would lead to the paperless office; businessmen would record letters and transport the waxed discs in the post. And the Net wasn't exactly invented to serve the masses and become the backbone to business concern and commerce.

In Jan, Han was set to transport his first screen to a branch of the armed forces. He hasn't taken a dime of venture uppercase, so his company is already in the black.

Meanwhile, wherever touch-screen technology leads, Han will face up stiff competition. Microsoft has been working on its own version, TouchLight, which offers echoes of the Spielberg sci-fi moving-picture show Minority Report. GE Healthcare, which manufactures MRI machines, is using TouchLight, licensed from Eon Reality, for 3-D imaging: Surgeons tin swipe their hands beyond the screen and interact with an MRI of a encephalon, peel abroad sections, and expect inside for tumors (retail toll: $50,675).

Mitsubishi is targeting a completely different marketplace with its DiamondTouch table, a collaborative tool for business that allows a group of people to interact at the aforementioned time via touch screen. Canada-based Smart Technologies has created a overnice niche selling interactive whiteboards to universities, corporations, and even to three branches of the U.South. military for briefings. Panasonic has been developing wall-size touch-screen displays, as has consulting firm Accenture, whose interactive billboards are already enticing passengers at O'Hare and JFK airports. Apple tree has filed for several patents in the field, and in that location are rumors, which the company won't confirm, of form, that it will shortly offer a affect-screen iPod.

But Han isn't exactly worried. In January he was set to send his kickoff wall screen to one of the branches of the military (he won't say which one) "and they are paying military prices–six figures," he says. His visitor volition as well be offer consulting services and support, which will generate even more than acquirement, and Han says he has a lot of other deals in the pipeline. He hasn't taken a dime of venture capital, so his company is in the black even before he has rented office space.

What's more, with the cost of cameras and screens plummeting, it is inevitable that interactive displays will be built into walls and in stores, in schools, on subways, maybe in taxicabs. In fact, a screen could be every bit thin as a slice of wallpaper, withal durable enough to handle the virtually rambunctious user.

Non everyone is sold on Han's thought. Ben Shneiderman, a reckoner science professor at the University of Maryland and a founding director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab, calls Han a "great showman" who has "opened the door to exciting possibilities." But he doesn't think Han'south engineering would exist suitable for a big-scale consumer product, nor as useful as a mouse on a large display. If yous are continuing in front of the screen, Shneiderman wonders, how would people behind you exist able to see what you lot're doing?

One fashion, Han counters, is for the demonstrator to simply move his ass out of the fashion. Another: Use a drafting-table display, as Han did at TED, and project the image on a wall-size screen.

But criticisms like these are a million light years from Han's listen. We're in his chaotic and cramped office at NYU. Books line a shelf, and a skein of wires unfurls across the floor. A computer circuit board is half taken apart (he stopped losing screws long ago), and a nearby whiteboard contains blueprints and sketches of the touch screen, plus a clever trick for hacking programming code.

Han is explaining why he formed Perceptive Pixel. "I desire to create an surroundings where I tin can create technology, get it into the hands of someone to market it, and move on to other technologies so I can keep innovating," he says. "I want to be a serial entrepreneur: Incubate an thought, get it to a practiced state, and brand that an enabler to get to the side by side state. Information technology's every researcher's fantasy."