Can't Touch This

Jefferson Han, a pale, bespectacled engineer dressed in Manhattan black, faced the thousand or so attendees on the first day of TED 2006, the annual technology, entertainment, and design conference in Monterey, California. The 30-year-old was little more than a curiosity at the confab, where, as its ad copy goes, "the world's leading thinkers and doers gather to find inspiration." And on that day, the thinkers and doers included Google gazillionaires Sergey Brin and Larry Page, e-tail amazon Jeff Bezos, and Bill Joy, who helped code Sun Microsystems from scratch. Titans of technology. It was enough to make anyone feel a bit small.

Then Han began his presentation. His fingertips splayed, he placed them on the cobalt blue 36-inch-wide display before him and traced playful, wavy lines that were projected onto a giant screen at his back. He conjured up a lava lamp and sculpted floating blobs that changed color and shape based on how hard he pressed. ("Google should have something like this in their lobby," he joked.) With the crowd beginning to stir, he called up some vacation photos, manipulating them on the monitor as if they were actual prints on a tabletop. He expanded and shrank each image by pulling his two index fingers apart or bringing them together. A few oohs and aahs bubbled up from the floor.

Suppressing a smile, Han told the assembled brain trust that he rejects the idea that "we are going to introduce a whole new generation of people to computing with the standard keyboard, mouse, and Windows pointer interface." Scattering and collecting photos like so many playing cards, he added, "This is really the way we should be interacting with the machines." Applause rippled through the room. Someone whistled. Han began to feel a little bigger.

But he was far from finished. Han pulled up a two-dimensional keyboard that floated slowly across the screen. "There is no reason in this day and age that we should be conforming to a physical device," he said. "These interfaces should start conforming to us." He tapped the screen to produce dozens of fuzzy white balls, which bounced around a playing field he defined with a wave of the hand. A flick of a finger pulled down a mountainous landscape derived from satellite data, and Han began flying through it, using his fingertips to swoop down from a global perspective to a continental one, until finally he was zipping through narrow slot canyons like someone on an Xbox. He rotated his hands like a clock's, tilting the entire field of view on its axis--an F16 in a barrel roll. He ended his nine-minute presentation by drawing a puppet, which he made dance with two fingers.

He basked in the rock-star applause. This is the best kind of affirmation, he thought. The moment you live for.

Six months later, after TED posted the video on its Web site, the blogosphere got wind of Han's presentation. Word spread virally through thousands of bloggers, who either posted the video on their sites or pointed to it on YouTube, where it was downloaded a quarter of a million times. "Uaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhwwwwwwwwwwwllllllllll I want one!!!" whined one YouTuber. "Just tell me where to buy one," said another. "Holy s--t. This is the future," cried a third. Han's presentation became one of YouTube's most popular tech videos of all time.

In this Googly age, it only takes a random genius or two to conceive of a technology so powerful that it can plow under the landscape and remake it in its own image. People are already betting that Jeff Han is one of them. (For an exclusive look at a new demo video, see Related Content at right.)

For as long as he can remember, Han, a research scientist working out of New York University's Courant Institute, has been fascinated by technology. He even doodles in right angles, rectangles, and squares--hieroglyphs that look almost like circuitry, a schematic of his unconscious. The son of middle-class Korean immigrants who emigrated to America in the 1970s to take over a Jewish deli in Queens, Han began taking apart the family TV, VCR, "anything that was blinking," at the age of 5 (he still has a nasty scar courtesy of a hot soldering iron his little sister knocked onto his foot). His father wasn't always happy about the houseful of half-reassembled appliances, but encouraged his son's technolust nevertheless, and even made him memorize his multiplication tables before he enrolled in kindergarten. At summer camp, Jeff hot-wired golf carts for nocturnal joy rides and fixed fellow campers' busted Walkmen in exchange for soda pop. He studied violin "like any good Asian kid." He was 12 when he built his first laser.