Elite Beyond Recognition: TouchScape Coffee Table

You don’t need it, and damn sure can’t afford it. While you gaze upon the showcase here, you can hear your checkbook crying wherever it is — that’s for sure. We don’t care. We’re just waving flashy stuff around that we can’t afford either. Welcome to your tour of the unnecessary and elite.

Pretty much every waiting room has a coffee table in it. But most of them are just places to keep old magazines that nobody ever reads. Why not turn your coffee table into a touch screen computer? The TouchScape High-Gloss Multi-Touch Coffee Table does just that. It’s basically a giant touch screen computer that’s supposed to be used as a way to display information.

They’ve pitched it as perfect for use at conventions to draw in customers, going out of their way to point out that it has built in analytics software that will automatically email you information about how the touchscreen is used and what people are looking at.

But wouldn’t it be nice to just have a giant computer/coffee table in your living room? How cool would it be to see an actor on screen and pull up his IMDb profile on your coffee table?

As mentioned before, it’s basically a computer with a giant touchscreen. It’s got an Intel quad core processor and standard desktop computer components inside. It’s the screen that’s special. It’s a touchscreen 47-inch HDTV that can accept 768 touch inputs at the same time. On the software side, it seems to be running Microsoft Surface. Surface is a touch friendly layer for Windows 7 that Microsoft has been developing for the past few years.

So how expensive is this creation? Well, they don’t even list a price on the site and numerous other technology sites that have run stories about the product don’t have any information either. That means it’s expensive as hell.