There have been a lot of different advancements in screen technology over the past few years. While screens were once big, could not display as many colors and could not interact in the slightest, today they can be downright tiny. And as if the fact that today’s screens are tinier and at the same time clearer than any of their predecessors ever were just was not good enough, the fact is that now there is actually a screen being developed that responds to the human touch. One of the loveliest displays of that ever done was a screen where every time you touched an area, it rippled outward from your fingertip in the way you would expect water to ripple in a pond.
While that is a great visual, and would also be a fun little toy to play with for a little while, it would be far from worth the amount of money it is likely going to cost when it first comes out on the consumer electronics market. If all that you wanted to do was to make something ripple, you can go outside and find (or even make) a puddle without spending any money, and without any great difficulty. Puddles are everywhere. What people really want and need are things that can rise above all of the gimmicks, and really serve a function.
Stepping out of the puddle aspect of this new screen type, it seems that it can also be a very functional way to move and manipulate objects that are on the screen. Imagine that you want to rearrange a PowerPoint presentation, or to organize your photos without a lot of fuss and muss. This is the kind of situation in which having a screen where you can simply drag and drop objects with the kind of ease that you could have with moving coins around on a table could be a real boon to you, and also some fun.