The MIT Media Lab was founded in 1985. This 25-year-old laboratory is engaged with 30 research groups as well as conducting more than 400 projects. These projects range from – how children learn to holography to nanotechnology. The Media Lab fosters research which in turn allows for the development of technologies, that are designed to invent new possibilities.

Today, the MIT Media Lab is working on an exciting project that stands to change how we interact with an LCD – the BiDiScreen. The bidirectional screen or BiDiScreen, can respond to both gesturing and touch. This is similar to what we have today with the HP TouchSmart and the Microsoft Surface table. This technology uses cameras positioned at the corners of the LCD screen. This technology is fine for implementations such as the TouchSmart and the Surface table but impractical for tablets, mobile phones or netbooks; which is the target device for the BiDiScreen.

Instead of using cameras in their implementation – the MIT Media Lab is using LCD screens equipped with optic sensors. The Media Lab then wrote applications that allowed those sensors to behave like pinhole cameras and make sense of the data.

The BiDiScreen will allow you to gesture commands – instead of taping on the screen or dragging your finger across the screen. A current application is the ability to manipulate on-screen images using predefined hand gestures. Today, the technology is limited to mobile devices. In the very near future, imagine having the ability to drag windows around a large screen all with the a flick of the wrist.

For all us geeks are you thinking “Minority Report?”