"We can turn any surface into a 3D touchscreen," explained Anup Chathoth, one third of Munich-based startup Ubi Interactive. Such claims typically conjure up images of floating Minority Report-style touchscreens made from curved glass, but that's exactly what this three-person team has developed.

Ubi's system uses a  Microsoft Kinect sensor to turn a regular projector into a multi-touch PC projection system, where regular PowerPoints, web pages, even games no longer require clickers or wireless mice to be navigated. By using the motion-tracking and depth-perception cameras in the Kinect, Ubi is able to detect where a user is pointing, swiping and tapping on a surface and interpret these gestures as if they were being performed on a giant touchscreen or interactive whiteboard.

All well and good in principle, but does it actually work? Wired.co.uk visited Ubi Interactive at Microsoft's Westlake offices in Seattle this week for a hands-on demonstration. And the answer was a resounding yes.

A conventional boardroom projector lit up a pane of frosted glass that was suspended in the centre of a low-lit office. On the other side of the pane was a Kinect sensor, which was capturing the movements and gestures of our hands in front of the glass and sending the data to Ubi's software, running on the same Windows PC that was sending the live image to a projector.

Responsiveness was excellent, with only a split second delay between performing a gesture and action happening on-screen. We played with a 3D model of Earth (as used on Microsoft's Surface), using two hands to zoom in and out of the virtual planet, spin the globe around and locate ourselves in downtown Seattle. Naturally, this was followed by a successful test of Rovio's AngryBirds.