People love to play with sand, even adults. This is very cool, harkens back to playing G.I. Joe's down by the river. I find his appearance amusing though. It is as if he showed up in a polo shirt and someone two sizes larger than him said, "hey man, borrow my jacket for the video," and he did.
I hadn't really known about the historic uses of sand tables until I came upon this virtual one. Seems to me that the novelty of using actual sand as the primary interface is somewhat irresistible. What I like about it though is how it combines sophisticated software with such a low tech material. Sand doesn't break. A table with a thousand columns and all those moving parts would be more difficult to repair. And given that recent conflicts have occurred in sandy areas, it's almost poetic that we can now use the make-up of their foreign terrain to map out operations against them. The most significant part of this for me, though, is how paramount the use of the hand is to the whole operation. Being one of the best tools for communication, I think that using our hands this way allows for a different kind of thinking. An interactive thinking. Or a thinking with no predetermination. I'm imagining a crew of soldiers somewhere brainstorming an operational strategy, standing together over the plastic substance, each of them equally able to build or destroy an idea because they all have the same tool to do it with.