So back to serious stuff: It seems that in the near future we can expect any surface to become a touch screen. And not just walls and glass, but even unexpected surfaces such as ice.

Yes, Nokia's Context-Aware Social Media team (now there's a cool-sounding job) at the company's research lab in Tampere, Norway, built . They called it Ubice, or ubiquitous ice (I'm not sure what that actually means, but whatever).

The Ubice system was built of blocks of river ice assembled into a 2 meter by 1.5 meter wall and the location of users' hands were detected using rear-diffused illumination (RDI), which was the basis for , a touchscreen table that for the princely sum of $12,500.

RDI works by projecting a plane of near-infrared light focused on the touch surface; in this case, from behind the ice wall onto the user side. When an object (a hand or anything else opaque) intersects with the illuminated surface, cameras operating in the same part of the spectrum detect the object's location, size, and movement whereupon regular, visible spectrum projectors paint images that are also focused on the user side of the ice wall.

Some of the imagery Nokia used for Ubice were flames and fire creating, dare I suggest, a poetic image of contrasting primality … or something like that. Anyway, it's dead sexy but somehow I can't see this being used in any enterprise that isn't in something like the cold storage business.