Did you watch ABC, CNN or Fox on election night? If so you probably marveled at some amazing touch screen technology on display live and operated in real-time. This political season for the first time reporters and anchors poked, prodded and flicked at large flat-panel monitors (the CNN screen measures about 7.5 feet from corner-to-corner) which responded with visually captivating displays of what was once boring columns of numbers. If you haven't seen it yet here's a demo to get you up-to-speed.

Behind this technology is a little company in New York City--Perceptive Pixel. InfoWorld chose it as one of its top-10 tech start-ups of 2008! Their technology places an acrylic panel with LEDs at its edges over the screen. The LED light traveling through the acrylic is predictable-- until your hand or finger gets in the way. The presence of a finger or hand diffuses the light which is then caught and analyzed by a camera behind the screen. The software doing this analysis is nimble enough to interpret these changes in light patterns in real time. So as a hand drags along the screen the image below follows. And this technology isn't limited to one or two hands--it's meant to be a collaborative multi-user environment.

Jeff Han, the company's founder (here's the home page from his days as a consultant at NYU) , explained the power behind his technology to the BBC:

""We are all familiar with the mouse, but it still takes a degree of skill to use it. Touch is so intuitive that it's able to be used by children, by grandparents, and people whose job it isn't to be able to use a computer,"

At CNN the maestro is John King. He doesn't operate the screen as much as he lets it become part of him. His moves, while talking to the camera, speak to the inherently intuitive nature of this system. But TV is really just the part of the iceberg that shows above the waterline. Perceptive Pixel's biggest clients are from the military and intelligence agencies. Like a busy TV newsroom, these are organizations with vast amounts of data that needs to be displayed, interpreted and understood quickly.