The top 10 tech startups for 2008

Hot tech startup: Perceptive Pixel

Founded: 2006

Tech breakthrough: Light injected into acrylic forms the basis for a breakthrough in touch-screen technology.

Business problem addressed: Improving touch screens to enhance collaboration and improve data display.

What the technology does: If you follow politics on cable news, chances are good that you've seen the handiwork of Jeff Han, the founder of Perceptive Pixel. The giant touch screens, walls really, that allow analysts to display massive bytes of graphically rendered data, and then drill down with the touch of a hand, have changed the way politics is reported on television. But that's only the best known use of the technology. Perceptive Pixel's biggest customers work in national defense. Details of those deployments are secret, but it's not hard to imagine a group of combat officers viewing a display of battlefield data. A tap of the finger and the view of a division zooms down to the company level. On the peacetime front, Perceptive Pixel is teaming with a CAD vendor to develop interactive displays of engineering or architectural data on a big screen.

How the technology works: The touch screen on most devices is an ingenuous but relatively simple bit of technology. A transparent material sits over a set of circuits; when touched a circuit closes, sending a signal to the logic. The limitation: The standard touch screen can determine only one point at a time, greatly limiting the amount of information that can be manipulated with each tap. Han, a researcher at New York University, took a very different approach: Light is injected and trapped in an acrylic sheet. When touched, the screen leaks light, which is picked up and measured by an image sensor that then sends data to the logic. Processing, of course, happens off the screen on standard hardware.

Forward spin: How scalable is the technology? After all, very few of us can afford a $100,000 display. Han says we can expect to see smaller versions of his touch walls sold as monitors in the not-too-distant future. Theoretically, the technology could scale down to the size of a handheld, but in addition to the obvious problems of engineering, there is also the problem of input, Han says. Large screens allow for broader motions with each tap; the touch of a palm, for example, can convey much more information then the tip of a finger.