HP Raids Minority Report for Wall of Touchscreen

When the San Francisco 49ers started thinking about selling seats in their new $1 billion stadium in Santa Clara, California, they knew they'd need something special to win over fans in the tech savvy Bay Area. So when HP invited 49ers Sales VP Al Guido over to its Cupertino Campus to check out a wall-sized touchscreen monitor it was developing, he jumped at the opportunity. The VantagePoint is six 47-inch HP 4730G displays stuck together. They fit into a big aluminum frame with an infrared touch overlay that can recognize 32 fingers simultaneously, all programmed to work as one giant, 11-foot touchscreen.
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When the San Francisco 49ers started thinking about selling seats in their new $1 billion stadium in Santa Clara, California, they knew they'd need something special to win over fans in the tech savvy Bay Area.

So when HP invited 49ers Sales VP Al Guido over to its Cupertino Campus to check out a wall-sized touchscreen monitor it was developing, he jumped at the opportunity. Guido had been touring the country learning how other football teams sold their tickets. Scale models were cute, but he wanted something more. "Everyone had the physical model, but no one really had an interactive thing for the client," he says. "How do you try to explain to people the inside of a building and how it works when it's not even built yet?"

Guido told HP he wanted something more like the science-fiction touchscreens in the 2002 movie, Minority Report. "They have all these touchscreens and people are moving stuff and I just felt that that's where it is heading," he says.

The VantagePoint is really six 47-inch HP 4730G displays stuck together. They fit into a big aluminum frame with an infrared touch overlay that can recognize 32 fingers simultaneously, all programmed to work as one giant, 11-foot touchscreen. You can play a killer game of Angry Birds on it with truly bird-sized projectiles, but HP thinks that people will do serious business with its new toy -- er, corporate display device.

HP wants to shake up the market for very large interactive screens with this product, which is big and dramatic enough to turn heads. But HP says that it's also cheap enough -- if you consider $125,000 cheap -- and easy enough to use that it will attract customers who might have previously passed on the thought of a massive show-offy touchwall.

HP sees companies buying the 900-pound monsters for corporate offices -- HP built the first one for its public relations company Edelman's Manhattan offices two years ago -- but that's just the beginning.

The company thinks that they could show up in the back office too -- to help designers collaborate -- or in trading companies or government agencies, where staffers need to study and figure out what to do based on large amounts of data.

There are already super-big touchscreens on the market, but they don't typically run on a stock Windows operating system, and the screens themselves are often kind of unresponsive. HP worked with Corning to make an especially thin, 2 mm version of its Gorilla Glass to cover the monitors. That makes the touchscreen especially easy to use, according to Mickie Calkins, the VantagePoint program manager with HP.

HP has taken pains to make it easy for owners to swap out monitors and cables behind the big touchscreen, and it runs on a standard version of Microsoft's Windows operating system. "If you're a developer for the Windows 7 platform, you don't have to do anything special for this," Calkins says. "They don't have to buy into a proprietary pipeline."