Will Multitouch change your digital life ?
11 Comments “Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Steve to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday better technology insights. Steve’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most here is to raise the right issues on underlying market trends, bringing to light new software, Internet services and consumer electronic devices. Steve, the floor is yours…”
Yes, it will.
Here is a short demo of an innovative project developed at NYU’s Department of Computer Science (requires Quicktime). I find it quite impressive, but wait for what’s next !
As perfectly described by NYU’s consultant Jeff Han,”multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations. Such sensing devices are inherently also able to accommodate multiple users simultaneously, which is especially useful for larger interaction scenarios such as interactive walls and tabletops. “
Although the first researches started way back in 1982, at the University of Toronto, multitouch has been mostly instigated by Apple (see the now legendary iPhone), and Quantum. FingerWorks, a startup which has pioneered the technology, was bought recently by the latter while the former is actually suing Apple for an alleged patent infringement on this very technology.
As usual, business-related bickerings must not hide the essential thing: this is really going to change our digital lives. In 1984, the introduction of graphical interfaces by Apple – courtesy of Xerox -, soon to be copied by Microsoft, also launched a controversial round of legal disputes, features-copying, etc… But in the end, everybody benefitted from this innovation and nowadays one cannot imagine a decent PC controlled only with a command line (of course, Unix users are alive and kicking, but even the wide majority of them always use some kind of graphical interface most of the time, right ?)
I am really confident about the future of multitouch. Not only does this allows us to zoom easily on a map with two fingers, but we will also benefit from being able to manipulate various tools, windows, and icons at the same time. Of course, the OS, which his accustomed to prioritizing tasks (processes, daemons, call them whatever you like) might find this quite uncomfortable. And it might seem somehow brain-exhausting to open a window with one finger while dragging an icon on it with the other hand: it’s like playing piano with two hands rather than one, something I personnally never achieved in 22 years despite huge efforts. Yet I am quite sure that with a bit of practice, multitouch will turn up very practical. And anyway, the next generation will have no trouble using such tools when they are fully generalized, and once again diehards geeks will be humiliated by their 8-year old brother (remember the advent of the Web ?).
Gains of productivity will surely be quite interesting….but imagine adding on top of this voice recognition: won’t all these technologies end up IN A TOTAL MESS ?
What do you think ?
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