I have been wanting to write a post about this for a long time but have never actually gotten around to doing it. The topic here is "viewing, showing, displaying" which was covered in our last "History & Visions of New Media" course session (which I unfortunately was not able to attend). Now on to the point of this post - multi-touch displays.This concept involves a lot more than just viewing or displaying. It's probably one of the most natural UI technologies between man and machine. According to Wikipedia multi-touch technology has a 25-year history but until recently there has not been much talk about it in public. Bill Buxton has aslo compiled a very nice overview of the history of multi-touch. His page describes numerous research projects but very few commercial devices.
If you have not seen multi-touch displays in action then I really recommend taking a look at Jeff Han's Mutli-Touch Interaction Research page. There are pictures (the one posted here is also from his website) and more importantly a video demonstration of the capabilities of this technology. The video is also available at Google.
Surely touch-screens are nothing new and I'm certain all of my blog readers have used a simple touch-screen but multi-touch screens have still mostly remained an area for research & development... until now that is. If you have seen the Apple iPhone then you have seen one of the first consumer devices for the "average Joe" that incorporates a multi-touch display. Apple has clearly recognized the implications of this technology and is leading the way for innovation by putting this wonderful technology in the hands of users.
2 comments:
As William Gibson once said, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet."
I think MultiTouch is definitely going to be the next big thing. The beauty of it is that it doesn't require the user to learn or adapt to a new thing and this has always been a major problem, especially with input devices (anyone know anyone who uses a chord keyboard? or even dvorak?)
This thing just makes sense.
MultiTouch makes sense, but I have a tiny little doubt that people maybe too used to keyboards to adapt to a hard surface, which a touch screen is. Another issue is perhaps how to find an ergonomic position for the combined keyboard/screen.
But the number of interfacing possibilities of the technology is compelling, as is the possibility of packing two physical components together. I agree, it will come.
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