Trend: Multi-touch screens

Multi-touch screen devices let users interact in new innovative ways, using more than just a finger.

Trend Description:
Apple’s iPhone was one of the first commercial applications for the new multi-touch interface technology. So far touch screens detected a single point of contact, multi-touch enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time. Such multi-touch devices would also enable multiple users to interact with one device simultaneously. Except the iPhone there are no other commercial multi-touch devices on the market yet. And even the iPhone’s touch screen is still widely criticized, because the touching fingers obscure the vision of the screen, which is called the “fat finger problem”. But there are some prototypes and developments which are promising an entirely new way to interact with devices.

Cases:

LucidTouch
The LucidTouch device does not look much different from the PlayStationPortable. It can be held comfortably in two and has a large touch-sensitive LCD screen, similar to that used in the iPhone. The big difference of this prototype, developed by MERL and Microsoft Research, is, that it can also be controlled using a touch-sensitive interface on its rear surface. When using the rear touch interface, the user’s fingers appear as shadows on the screen, giving the illusion they are holding a transparent device. Just highlighting the active point of each finger with a small green dot, LucidTouch is removing the problem of covering to much screen area with “fat fingers”.

Jeff Han: Multi Touch Screen Project
Jeff Han and his team are developing and researching a variety of application scenarios and interaction modalities of multi-touch information input. According to their website „this goes far beyond the “poking” actions you get with a typical touchscreen, or the gross gesturing found in video-based interactive interfaces. It is a rich area for research, and we are extremely excited by its potential for advances in efficiency, usability, and intuitiveness. It’s also just so much fun!“ To fully understand this it is best, to watch the video.

Video: click picture above

Trend Impact:
Some researcher would like to see the technology pushed further:
Alistair Edwards from the University of York suggest to build in orientation detectors, which would enable to manipulate objects by tilting the device. Han mainly works with big screen projects. But all researchers have one idea in common. They want to improve user interaction. The industry just has to keep their eyes open and incorporate the best and most innovative multi-touch technologies.

Lucid Touch Screen

Multi Touch Screen

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