BumpTop: A New Meaning to Desktop Interactivity

If you're bored of that dull desktop, you may get a few kicks out of BumpTop's 3D presentation and smooth physics-based animation to give you Apple's Multi-touch power to your mouse clicking fingertips. Although, we imagine cleaning two different messy desks would probably come as a bit annoying, it still looks like a pretty clever design that reminds us of Microsoft's unreleased "Surface" or HP's TouchSmart PC.

Here's a demo of the BumpTop in action at TED 2007 (the embedded VideoEgg player kind of sucks, you'll have to pick a "player" - it doesn't matter which one):

The product isn't finalized yet and still has a long ways to go, but if you want to help beta test it, feel free to sign up for their mailing list and you'll be able to get your hands dirty with 3-dimensionally folders and icons in no time.

Once you have your hands on the beta, you can check out the many interesting themes over at Customize, where you can go with environments that range from fiery to sci-fi. A pretty nifty idea to spruce up that old PC with a decent video card for the kitchen.

Comments (1)

I don't know... this interface is really cool, and I love the options it would give you for how you want to organize and view your files... but I think the thing that's really holding our desktop technology back isn't the interface, it's the tangibility. We still have to access everything through a mouse and keyboard! If this were used in a touchscreen (or even some kind of VR) situation, it would become suddenly a thousand times more practical.

Then again, so would XP and OSX...

posted by Citizen Gain on November 7th 2008 at 7:01am
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