Our jaws dropped at LucidTouch, a great see-through touchscreen idea Microsoft showed us last October. Now the company’s photoshopped up a really pretty simulated tablet PC using the technology that lets you see your hands on the other side of the screen, controlling the unit from behind. It all makes perfect sense, because with smaller touchscreens, you find your fingers getting in the way. Why not just control the thing from the other side?

There’s a catch. The real prototype (see it in the gallery below) doesn’t look quite as cool as these artful renderings, because it has a goofy-looking camera hanging off the back to detect your hand and finger positions. Microsoft wizards are said to be busy working on an infrared sensor mounted inside the back of the device that can detect your hand position without that clunky camera, but we’d like to see that in the real world before we stop calling it vaporware.

Via Dance With Shadows and Pocket-lint