Photo via engadget About four years ago I almost rolled out on the floor laughing at Fred Armisen's parody of CNN's Magic Map Wall during the Weekend Update segment of Saturday Night Live. When I came across the video clip, I couldn't resist sharing it on my blog, and thought I'd share the video clip once again in honor of Election Day:
My 10/25/08 post, Multi-touch Parody of CNN's Magic Map Wall by Fred Armisen on SNL's MegaPixel Giant Touch-map, was written when large touch-screen displays were beginning to gain steam in a variety of markets. At the time, not all of the kinks had been worked out, and there were few people around who knew much about developing programs for use on these displays. Since then, there have been many improvements in both hardware and software. Jeff Han, of Perceptive Pixel, provided the multi-touch screen system for CNN and the SNL parody. He recently sold Perceptive Pixel to Microsoft and now works as a general manager for Microsoft Office. He's spreading the word about Microsoft's venture into large multi-touch displays- (55 and 82 inches), powered by Windows 8. For more information about Jeff Han and Microsoft Office, take a look at my blog post featuring a recent video of Jeff Han's presentation about Windows 8 for large displays, Microsoft's new multi-touch, pen, and ink technology. The video also includes a presentation about experience design considerations for large displays, by Nathan Fish.
Most viewers familiar with CNN news know about the "Multi-Touch Collaboration Wall", or Magic Wall, used by John King. David Borhman, a CNN producer, was describes the purpose of the Magic Wall in a quote in a Washington Post article:
"It's a stupendous way to explain a lot of complicated data"..."Fundamentally, our job is to explain things to people, and we need it visually. This lets us do it naturally, without a keyboard or mouse getting in the way....Once you see it, you get it instantly."
This would be fun to play with- for just about everyone! If you don't have ready access to a "magic wall", take a look Fred Armisen's playfulness in a recent Saturday Night Live parody of the CNN Magic wall:
"One thing we are going to look at is Pennsylvania..Have a very good look at Harrisburg.....Get in really close to this. Back a bit, back a little bit, excellent"
"Now the country can be moved up and down, like so....We can also shrink it and put it in your pocket if you need to."
"You can always change the colors. You got blue, blue again, a little bit of red...right over there, a little bit of blue of course, if you want to make something out of green, you got a little face there, some whiskers, we can ..... make a cat. Notice the triangle nose!"
"Let's look at Ohio. Lets look at the Cleveland area. Lets look really really close. Really close. Really really close, You can see the top of a warehouse. We're really going to want look at that. Very, very important, were going to want to look at that."
"You can take Oregon, lets move it out into the ocean. It will be completely surrounded by water. That's very, very dangerous."
"And here is New York.... New York was there in 2004, and you can shake it around like that.. (shakes New York)"
"Actually, what I'm doing is very important, and informational"
"OK, Fred, stop goofing around..."
Fred turns to the map, and with both hands, moves all of the states out of place.
