There have been a variety of uses for multitouch tables, but, to be honest, most of them aren’t really that interesting.  We have all seen the promos of people having the time of their life pinch-zooming pictures and flicking them around, but it doesn’t look like much fun to me.  That is until I saw someone cutting through a 3D skull and spinning it around for a better look on the Virtual Autopsy Table.

Beyond the gimmicky picture stuff, these multitouch tables (or screens)  have near-unlimited potential in the educational field.  I felt like a kid again, watching the video  from the Norrköping Visualization Centre and the Center for Medical Image Science and Visualization in Sweden.  Hours could easily become days if I had a chance explore and learn the human body on a system like that.  Multitouch gives the user great control over the 3D model and allows for easy and intuitive exploration — essential to the experience.

The Virtual Autopsy Table was obviously designed for educational purposes, now if only every school could afford to buy one, we might be headed in the right direction. In my experience children and adults alike love to play and touch with these kind of displays, so why not try to teach them something at the same time? Hopefully the Virtual Autopsy Table will start showing up in museums, at least.   It would be really cool if they could start compiling a large set of these models so that way users could dissect some animals or bugs without getting their hands dirty.