This raises the possibility of Apple designing a see-through iPhone - in which case, it would be wise to buy shares in ear hair clippers, because people on the London Underground (e.g.) will be displaying their earlobes a lot more than usual. And earlobes are horrible.

Didn't B&O have a remote for one of their stereo systems that worked in a similar way about 15 years ago!

The MS/Mitsubishi solution is practical at least because the "fingers" are virtual... they're not literally visible (as in the Apple patent... which assumes they can somehow fit all the electronics in the bezel - as B&O did) ... they are a graphical overlay based on the camera view...

As a UMPC user I'd love to see this made real/practical (without the camera on a stick out the back!)

Isn't this basically going to be like an old OHP LCD panel with a touch panel stuck on each side?

The bezel might be a bit bulky, but nothing particularly problematic.

Fitting the CPU, storage etc. into the bezel could be difficult, but depending on the device they wouldn't have to be huge. And there's always the option of having the processor remote, and connected via a cable or a wireless link.

And the software to drive everything isn't complicated.

A fully working prototype would probably be the work of a couple of weeks.

The only thing is though that this looks like it might not actually be worth doing - I suspect that while it may look cool as a tech demo, there isn't any particularly good argument for something like this - what exactly does it do better than a plain old conventional touch panel? Nothing I can think of, though I can see lots of ways it would be worse.

you refer to the BeoLink 5000 i think. which did indeed have a transparent lcd display at the top of the remote control to tell you what av source you had selected and the channel etc that was playing. however it wasn't touch sensitive. it did have buttons on front and back, but they were normal buttons on the main part of the controller, not used via the lcd display

http://www.beoworld.org/prod_details.asp?pid=696

however, it wasn't a patch on the BeoLink 7000 that was just the best thing in the whole wide world