Most viewers familiar with CNN news know about the "Multi-Touch Collaboration Wall", or Magic Wall, used by John King. David Borhman, a CNN producer, was describes the purpose of the Magic Wall in a quote in a Washington Post article:

"It's a stupendous way to explain a lot of complicated data"..."Fundamentally, our job is to explain things to people, and we need it visually. This lets us do it naturally, without a keyboard or mouse getting in the way....Once you see it, you get it instantly."

This would be fun to play with- for just about everyone! If you don't have ready access to a "magic wall", take a look Fred Armisen's playfulness in a recent Saturday Night Live parody of the CNN Magic wall:


Video clip via Hulu

Update:  Transcript from the 2008 SNL Show

Partial Transcript:

"One thing we are going to look at is Pennsylvania..Have a very good look at Harrisburg.....Get in really close to this. Back a bit, back a little bit, excellent"

"Now the country can be moved up and down, like so....We can also shrink it and put it in your pocket if you need to."

"You can always change the colors. You got blue, blue again, a little bit of red...right over there, a little bit of blue of course, if you want to make something out of green, you got a little face there, some whiskers, we can ..... make a cat. Notice the triangle nose!"

"Let's look at Ohio. Lets look at the Cleveland area. Lets look really really close. Really close. Really really close, You can see the top of a warehouse. We're really going to want look at that. Very, very important, were going to want to look at that."

"You can take Oregon, lets move it out into the ocean. It will be completely surrounded by water. That's very, very dangerous."

"And here is New York.... New York was there in 2004, and you can shake it around like that.. (shakes New York)"

"Actually, what I'm doing is very important, and informational"

"OK, Fred, stop goofing around..."

Fred turns to the map, and with both hands, moves all of the states out of place.

[Image]
Photo via engadget

"Check out Michigan... I can make it bounce!" (Drags down Michigan on the map, it bounces up and down once it reaches the bottom of the map.)

Rumor has it that Jeff Hans, of Perceptive Pixel, was responsible for the SNL version of the Magic Touch-Wall map.

Update 11/4/08:

CNN article confirms that Jeff Hans is the inventor behind the election 'Magic Wall'.

Jeff Han's 2006 demo of his multi-touch applications at TED.

Update
I thought I'd add the video clip that makes a little fun of Microsoft's Surface: