Nikon’s weird web toy to plug Coolpix S70

Late in 2009, Nikon released a new consumer-level point-and-shoot camera, the shiny Coolpix S70, and obviously wanted people to rush out and buy it.

So it’s built – probably at enormous expense – a weird web toy that almost-but-not-quite emulates the experience of using the camera’s multitouch screen.

They could have saved themselves a bit of cash by simply saying: “It works like an iPhone,” and having a video of a real person actually demonstrating the device in the studio.

But no. Instead they’ve built the Virtual Touch Experience, a Flash web app that uses your computer’s webcam to track your finger movements in the air, and manipulate a gallery of images displayed in your browser.

It sounds easy enough, and is pretty clever use of a webcam. But in practice I found the gestures to be almost meaningless. I could wave my fingers around and stuff happened on screen, but I was never sure exactly what stuff would happen next.

You activate Virtual Touch Experience with a bookmark, and in theory you can use it on any online picture gallery, as well as a sample gallery on Nikon’s site. I tried it on several different Flickr pages and couldn’t get it to work; your milage may vary.

This all looks like a gimmick, which is a pity because having a multitouch control screen on the back of a point-and-shoot camera is a pretty cool idea, and an obvious next step for that style of camera to take now that iPhones and iPod touches are so popular.

My advice is watch the intro video, which tells you all you need to know. But skip the bookmark “experience”, because it isn’t much of an experience at all.