Given the recent interest in multi-touch interaction following the announcement of the iPhone, I thought I would point to Bill Buxton’s brief history of multi-touch interaction research. There’s also some background in the Fastcompany interview of Jeff Han.
By the way, I much prefer this latest video of Jeff Han’s work than his TED presentation.
Apparently you can make your own multi-touch screen (by following Jeff’s original paper) but it would appear the real wizardry is in the software…