Jefferson Han, a pale, bespectacled engineer dressed in Manhattan black, faced the thousand or so attendees on the first day of TED 2006, the annual technology, entertainment, and design briefing in Monterey, California. The 30-year-quondam was little more than than a curiosity at the confab, where, as its ad copy goes, "the globe'south leading thinkers and doers get together to find inspiration." And on that day, the thinkers and doers included Google gazillionaires Sergey Brin and Larry Page, due east-tail amazon Jeff Bezos, and Pecker Joy, who helped code Sunday Microsystems from scratch. Titans of engineering science. It was plenty to make anyone feel a bit small-scale.

Then Han began his presentation. His fingertips splayed, he placed them on the cobalt blue 36-inch-broad brandish earlier 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 have something like this in their entrance hall," he joked.) With the oversupply start to stir, he called upward some vacation photos, manipulating them on the monitor as if they were actual prints on a tabletop. He expanded and shrank each image by pulling his two alphabetize fingers apart or bringing them together. A few oohs and aahs bubbled up from the flooring.

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

But he was far from finished. Han pulled upwardly a ii-dimensional keyboard that floated slowly across the screen. "At that place is no reason in this twenty-four hour period and historic period that we should be conforming to a physical device," he said. "These interfaces should outset conforming to us." He tapped the screen to produce dozens of fuzzy white balls, which bounced around a playing field he divers with a wave of the hand. A movie of a finger pulled downwardly a mountainous landscape 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 like someone on an Xbox. He rotated his hands like a clock's, tilting the entire field of view on its axis–an F16 in a barrel roll. He ended his nine-infinitesimal presentation by drawing a puppet, which he made dance with two fingers.

He basked in the stone-star adulation. This is the best kind of affirmation, he thought. The moment you live for.

Six months subsequently, after TED posted the video on its Web site, the blogosphere got wind of Han'due south presentation. Word spread virally through thousands of bloggers, who either posted the video on their sites or pointed to it on YouTube, where it was downloaded a quarter of a million times. "Uaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhwwwwwwwwwwwllllllllll I desire one!!!" whined one YouTuber. "Just tell me where to buy one," said another. "Holy southward–t. This is the hereafter," cried a third. Han'southward presentation became one of YouTube's about popular tech videos of all time.

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

For every bit long as he can think, Han, a enquiry scientist working out of New York University's Courant Institute, has been fascinated by technology. He even doodles in right angles, rectangles, and squares–hieroglyphs that expect almost like circuitry, a schematic of his unconscious. The son of center-grade Korean immigrants who emigrated to America in the 1970s to take over a Jewish deli in Queens, Han began taking apart the family unit Television, VCR, "annihilation that was blinking," at the age of five (he still has a nasty scar courtesy of a hot soldering iron his footling sister knocked onto his pes). His father wasn't ever happy about the houseful of half-reassembled appliances, just encouraged his son'southward technolust nonetheless, 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 fellow campers' disrepair Walkmen in exchange for soda pop. He studied violin "like whatever good Asian child." He was 12 when he built his first laser.

His parents scrimped and saved to send him to the Dalton School, an elite individual loftier school on Manhattan'due south Upper Eastward Side, then Cornell University, where he studied electrical engineering and computer science. Han skipped out on his senior yr without graduating to join a startup that bought a videoconferencing technology he developed while a student. A decade later, he'due south poised to alter the face up of computing.

Until now, the touch screen has been express to the uninspiring sort found at an ATM or an aerodrome ticket kiosk–basically screens with electronic buttons that recognize one finger at a fourth dimension. Han's bear upon display, past contrast, redefines the way commands are given to a computer: It uses both movement and pressure–from multiple inputs, whether 2 fingers or 20–to convey information to the silicon brain nether the display. Already, industries and companies as diverse equally defence force contractor Lockheed Martin, CBS News, Pixar, and unnameable government intelligence agencies have approached Han to go concord of his invention. And, no surprise, he has formed a startup company to market place it, Perceptive Pixel.

"Touch is one of the most intuitive things in the world," Han says. "Instead of being one footstep removed, similar you are with a mouse and keyboard, y'all have direct manipulation. Information technology's a completely natural reaction–to see an object and want to impact it."

On a contempo Tuesday afternoon, Han gives me a individual demonstration at NYU. The 36-inch-wide drafting table he used at TED has since evolved into a giant screen: two eight-pes-by-3-human foot panels. I observe the screen is not simply smudge resistant simply durable–or every bit Han says, "peanut butter–proof," a phrase he didn't invent but liked enough to co-opt.

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

Han teaches me the one pattern I need to know–a circular motion alike to a proofreader's delete symbol, which brings upward a pie-chart menu of applications. I poke at it, and suddenly I'm inside the mapping software, overlooking an barren mountain range. Spread two fingers apart, and I'm zooming through canyons. Push them together, and I'm skying thousands of feet higher up. I'g not just looking at three-dimensional terrain, I'grand living in it: I'g wherever I want to exist, instantly, in whatsoever scale, hurdling whole ridgelines with a single gesture, or gratis-falling downwardly to any rooftop in any city on world. This ain't no MapQuest. Han'southward machine is faster–much faster–considering there's cypher between me and the data: no mouse, no cursor, no pull-down windows. It'south seamless, firsthand, ridiculously easy. No manual required.

An NYU colleague pokes his caput in (Han greets him like he does most everyone: "Dude!") and tells him that a producer from the Ellen DeGeneres Show called. Han is amused but declines the invitation to appear. Ever since he became a Web phenomenon, he has been receiving all sorts of offers, come-ons, lecture requests. An official from SPAWAR, a subdivision of the Navy focused on space and naval warfare planning, queried Han most collaborating. A producer from CBS News wondered how to make use of Han'southward touch screen for special events like election coverage. A dance deejay asked if he had a production to spin music at clubs. A teenager asked how he could become a computer engineer too (reply: "Written report math").

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

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

Before reinventing the affect screen, Han was only 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 nail-bust era a "collusion of bulls–t"). With his father ill, and ready for a modify 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 Constitute, where he has been for the past 4 years. The scope of the projects he's involved in is a testament to the sheer wattage of his brain. Ii are funded by DARPA, the Defense Avant-garde Enquiry Projects Bureau under the Department of Defence, including one involving visual odometry: Modeling his work on the brain of a honeybee, Han has been looking for means to make a estimator know where it has been and where information technology is going–role of an try to build a flying camera that would exist able to find its manner over long distances. Han has likewise fabricated it to the second round of a DARPA project to create an autonomous robot vehicle that can traverse terrain by learning from its own experiences. The goal: to perfect an unmanned footing gainsay vehicle that could operate over rough trails, in jungles or desert sand, or weave through heavy traffic as if information technology had a skilled driver behind the wheel. 1 non-DARPA project involves reflectometry. Han came up with a manner to scan materials then they are faithfully reproduced digitally. The process typically requires shining a light on a piece of fabric, a flag, say, from dozens of different angles, and scanning each one into a figurer–a time-consuming proposition. But Han developed an elegant shortcut: He built a kaleidoscope with 3 mirrors that reverberate one another. Once a swatch of textile is inserted, the scope yields 22 reflections mimicking different angles of calorie-free. When data from each reflection are scanned, the effect is a flag that can be formed into any shape–one that looks similar it's waving in the breeze, with each ripple and each slight shift in calorie-free rendered to a photographic exactitude. The whole process takes a fraction of the fourth dimension Hollywood's best computer animators would need.

Han brought a similarly businesslike do-it-yourself attitude to his study of touch-screen engineering. 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 art pieces. But that was nigh it. The concept hadn't advanced much from where it was in the 1980s, when Nib Buxton, at present a Microsoft researcher, was experimenting with touch-screen synthesizers. "Most of it was designed with toys in mind," Han says, "something you lot 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 grade of an ordinary drinking glass of water. 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 cobweb eyes, calorie-free bounces on the inside of the cable until it emerges from the other stop miles away. If the surface was made of glass, and the light was interrupted by, say, a finger, the light wouldn't bounciness anymore, information technology would diffuse–some of it would bleed into the finger, some would shoot straight down, which was happening with his water glass. Physicists call the principle "frustrated total internal reflection" (it sounds similar something your therapist might say).

Han decided to put these errant low-cal beams to work. It took him just a few hours to come up up with a prototype. "Yous have to have skills to build," he says. "You can't be 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 low-cal source. To the back, he mounted an infrared photographic camera. When Han placed his fingers on the makeshift screen, some light ricocheted straight downwards, just equally he idea information technology would, and the camera captured the lite image pixel for pixel. The harder he pressed, the more information the photographic camera captured. Han theorized he could design software that would measure the shape and size of each contact and assign a series of coordinates that defined it. In essence, each betoken of contact became a distinct region on a graph. "It'south like a thumbprint scanner, diddled up in calibration and encapsulating all 10 or more fingers. It converts touch to light." Information technology could also scale images appropriately, and then if he pulled a photograph apart with ii fingers, the image would grow.

"People want this technology, and they desire it bad," says Douglas Edric Stanley, inventor of his own touch-screen "hypertable" and a professor of digital arts at the Aix-en-Provence School of Art in France. "I affair that excited me virtually Jeff Han'due south organisation is that because of the infrared light passing horizontally through the prototype surface itself, it can rail not only the position of your manus only also the contact force per unit area and potentially even the approach of your mitt to the screen. These are amazing little details, and pretty much give you everything y'all would need to move touchable imagery abroad from a purely point-and-click logic."

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

The first affair the pair did was to change NASA Globe Wind, a gratis Google Globe–type open up-source mapping program. (Han figured the armed forces would be nifty on annihilation that works faster, since split seconds mean the difference between life and death.) And then they created the photograph manipulator, which lets you upload pictures from Flickr or anywhere else on the Spider web (it tin 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 see on one 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 assist y'all visualize spreadsheet data and motion them around from one signal in time to another, while Shape Sketching lets you draw on-screen equally hands every bit yous tin with a pencil on paper–and then animate these shapes instantly. Down the road, information technology may be possible to draw Bart Simpson on-screen and instruct the reckoner in what you lot want him to do.

"As computers have become more powerful, computer graphics have advanced to the point where it'south possible to create photo-realistic images," Han says. "The clogging wasn't, How practice we brand pixels prettier? It was, How practice we engage with them more?"

Today'southward computers presume you are Napoleon, with your left hand tucked into your suit," says Bill Buxton, whom Han considers to be the father of the multitouch screen. "Only a lot of things are better performed with two hands. Multiple- sensor touch on screens bridge the gap betwixt the physical and virtual world."

Listen you, this doesn't mean touch screens will completely replace the computer mouse, QWERTY keyboard, or traditional graphic user interface (or GUI) whatever more than cinema made alive theater disappear or television supplanted radio. Each continues to do what it does best. Your iPod or cell phone may be fine for short music videos, but y'all probably wouldn't want to lookout a two-hr movie on information technology. "These media fall into their advisable niche and are displaced in areas where they are non the best," Buxton says.

Han really doesn't know how his mapping software, photo manipulator, or any of information technology volition ultimately be used–these applications are really proofs of concept, non ends in themselves. "When unexpected uses emerge that no ane e'er idea of, that'south when information technology gets exciting and takes off," says Don Norman, a professor at Northwestern University and writer of Emotional Blueprint. Thomas Edison, afterwards all, believed the phonograph would lead to the paperless function; businessmen would record letters and ship the waxed discs in the mail service. And the Internet wasn't exactly invented to serve the masses and become the backbone to business and commerce.

In January, Han was ready to ship his first screen to a branch of the military. He hasn't taken a dime of venture capital, and so his company is already in the blackness.

Meanwhile, wherever touch on-screen technology leads, Han will face up potent contest. Microsoft has been working on its own version, TouchLight, which offers echoes of the Spielberg sci-fi pic Minority Report. GE Healthcare, which manufactures MRI machines, is using TouchLight, licensed from Eon Reality, for 3-D imaging: Surgeons tin can swipe their easily across the screen and interact with an MRI of a brain, skin away sections, and look inside for tumors (retail price: $l,675).

Mitsubishi is targeting a completely different market with its DiamondTouch tabular array, a collaborative tool for business concern that allows a group of people to interact at the same time via touch screen. Canada-based Smart Technologies has created a nice niche selling interactive whiteboards to universities, corporations, and even to 3 branches of the U.South. war machine for briefings. Panasonic has been developing wall-size touch on-screen displays, as has consulting business firm Accenture, whose interactive billboards are already enticing passengers at O'Hare and JFK airports. Apple has filed for several patents in the field, and there are rumors, which the company won't confirm, of course, that it volition soon offering a touch-screen iPod.

But Han isn't exactly worried. In January he was prepare to ship his first wall screen to ane of the branches of the military machine (he won't say which one) "and they are paying military prices–six figures," he says. His company will as well be offering consulting services and support, which will generate fifty-fifty more revenue, and Han says he has a lot of other deals in the pipeline. He hasn't taken a dime of venture capital, and then his company is in the black fifty-fifty before he has rented part space.

What'south more, with the price of cameras and screens plummeting, it is inevitable that interactive displays volition be congenital into walls and in stores, in schools, on subways, maybe in taxicabs. In fact, a screen could exist as thin as a piece of wallpaper, yet durable enough to handle the about rambunctious user.

Not everyone is sold on Han's idea. Ben Shneiderman, a computer 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's applied science would be suitable for a large-scale consumer product, nor as useful as a mouse on a big display. If you are standing in front of the screen, Shneiderman wonders, how would people behind you exist able to see what you're doing?

One fashion, Han counters, is for the demonstrator to simply move his ass out of the way. Another: Use a drafting-tabular array display, every bit Han did at TED, and project the paradigm on a wall-size screen.

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

Han is explaining why he formed Perceptive Pixel. "I desire to create an environment where I can create technology, get it into the hands of someone to market it, and move on to other technologies so I can go on innovating," he says. "I want to be a serial entrepreneur: Incubate an idea, get it to a skillful state, and make that an enabler to get to the next state. It's every researcher's fantasy."