Wouldn’t it be cool if you could, like, actually reach into your computer and touch whatever ‘s onscreen with your own hands? Well, that’s the promise of a futuristic new computing device called the Space Top, which was unveiled at the TED Conference in Los Angeles yesterday. Billed as the world’s first 3D computer, SpaceTop’s transparent display and 3D workspace allows users to quite literally manipulate on-screen elements using only their hands.

Jinha Lee, an MIT graduate student and intern at Microsoft’s Applied Science group took to the stage yesterday to demonstrate his next-generation device. During his time at Microsoft, Lee became involved in a project to develop new methods for interacting with a computer, as part of a larger effort aimed at designing a 3D desktop.

Using a traditional mouse and even gesture-based controls on a touchscreen only allows for 2D interaction – for example, we can scroll up, down, left and right, but in order to zoom in and out and twist things around, the best we have is pinch controls, which is still a 2D gesture.

Lee was tasked with designing an interface which would allow users to move their hands naturally in order to interact with elements on-screen, such as documents and windows. So far, SpaceTop is a little rough around the edges, but at the same time the 3D interface is hugely promising.

SpaceTop features a transparent display equipped with a camera for tracking the user’s head. It then adjusts the viewer’s perspective on the 3D desktop, while a second camera follows the users hands and tracks their position in the 3D display. For now, SpaceTop is a work in progress but the limited capabilities displayed by Lee were pretty damn impressive.  For example, grabbing a file from a stack is as easy as picking one up in real life, and as you’ll see in the video below, objects can easily be ‘picked up’ and rotated in 3D far more easily than one could do with a mouse.

We probably won’t see a commercially available SpaceTop anytime soon as the project is far from finished. One of the main challenges is that currently there isn’t any software available for such an operating system (that’s basically what it is), and so Lee has had to build all of his programs from scratch.

For now, the SpaceTop 3D computer will remain just a prototype, but it does at least give us a glimpse of what might be in store for the future of desktop computing.