The technology is named DiamondTouch. Imagine a 42-inch touch screen covering nearly the whole surface of a 47-inch tabletop. This is not a usual touch screen. Its surface is surrounded with an array of antennas that conduct energy.

The reason behind this is; that energy fills a circuit with the people seating surrounding the table. The level of electricity is safe; it’s same as the level that goes from your body while weighing yourself on one of the bathroom scales. The other end of the circuit is in the individual pads that every person around the table is sitting on. DiamondTouch can at present handle up to 5 people.

One of the nice features is that every person is identified as an individual quantity by the system. That means it knows who is touching the table’s surface. When someone touches the table, their signal gets transferred to a computer. The computer transfers the picture to a projector, which projects them on to the surface of the table. Marks made by every person appear in different colors, to know who did what.

At present, the pictures projected are limited to 2-dimensional and on a smooth surface. Finally, they seemingly haven’t found out how to do that. On the other side, Mitsubishi Electric has a video demonstration of this table in action. Even the little bit that they show is very exciting, and it only gives the smallest taste of the possible applications.

The company is working on expansion of DiamondTouch by bringing up with multi-display applications for instance, a table plus a wall. In the work environment, for example, the technology can be used at a collaborative meeting that has a presentation mixed with some pretty active brainstorming.