Fluid Tunes for the Mac (Wikked Cool!!)

Fluid Tunes is gesture recognition software that, when combined with an iSight camera, can be used to control the iTunes library. Here is a good post from the Alltogether blog with a video podcast of the program in action. Granted you can already do this on an iPhone by touching the screen, but this new application allows users to stand back from the screen and use a camera to interact with the computer.

This post and a couple of others I found all reference the film adaptation of the short story Minority Report and its use of Multi-touch technology as described in Wikipedia:

The film foreshadowed multi-touch technology that would become a reality several years later. Anderton interacts with the Precrime computer using a large holographic wall display, which he manipulates with his hands while wearing special gloves. He uses gestures such as "spreading" to enlarge an image and "dragging" to move images around. Earlier films such as Tron (1982) had featured multi-touch technology, but the fast, fluid, and dynamic manipulation of real-time video in Minority Report captured the public imagination in a way that earlier depictions had not.

Today this technology is become commonplace with the iPhone and now the Blackberry Storm. And how many of the news teams on election night this year could not keep hands off their interactive electoral maps [as envisioned by SNL - 5:27 mark] .

But it was not so long ago that this technology was fresh and new and causing the TED crowd to oooh and aaahhh. Here is a video from TED 2006 where Jeff Han - a research scientist for New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences - demonstrates an "interface-free," touch-driven computer screen, which can be manipulated intuitively with the fingertips, and responds to varying levels of pressure.
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BBC NEWS | Technology | IBM helps blind 'see' web video

From BBC News - Technology

Big Blue will soon launch a multimedia browser designed to make audio and video content accessible to people with vision impairments. Codenamed the Accessibility Browser, the tool is designed to provide computer users with visual impairments the same control over multimedia content that sighted people have when using a mouse.

The new browser is the creation of Dr. Chieko Asakawa, a blind employee at IBM's research laboratory in Tokyo. Dr Asakawa was becoming increasingly frustrated by the amount of web content that she was unable to access. For the time being, she and her team are concentrating on content that is compatible with Real Player and Windows Media Player.

• WebAIM has good information on the current state of Media Player Accessibility.
• The National Center for Accessible Media [NCAM] has Design Guidelines for Electronic Publications, Multimedia and the WebDesign Guidelines for Electronic Publications, Multimedia and the Web.
• NCAM is also home to MagPIE - an authoring tool for making Web- and CD-ROM-based multimedia materials accessible.