Thread: Touch and Multi-Touch

Though they were introduced in the market in the 1970s, touch screens have not been able to reach mass adoption, due to pricing and lack of some path breaking applications in the mainstream industry, There were specific applications of touch screens in specialized tablets for police, medical and research segments but that was not a value for money proposition in the main stream market till the advent of smart phones.

Smart phones made touch screens very popular and more affordable, But the future is brighter for touch screens because we are about to see lots of applications around very soon. For instance, the MultiTouch Ready iPhone has made the first big dent in the market, changing the way we interact with devices forever.
60 IpeQUESTI DECEMBER 2008.

When we use a computer's graphical interface either using a mouse or a touch screen, the point of contact or the point of operation remains one. For example, while using a mouse you will find only a single mouse curser, and while using fingers or a stylus on a touch screen you will touch a single point of contact to operate. But what if you want to touch or operate multiple points of a CUI simultaneouslY? This is what multi-touch promises to deliver.



The applications for multi-touch are immense. Imagine a case where you have a 60 or 100 inch disylay at your home which is more than enough for two people to share and work on. Just one machine with good-processing power and a single scre'f:n can enable many people to work simultaneously on it. This concept is called Screen Sharing which might become widespread in near future with the advent of large wall-sized screens. Simply imagine playing a virtual Piano on a touchscreen.

And not to forget the type of performance benefit you get while using multitouch of many applications such as, drawing and designing tools, handling interface, etc you save a lot of time by using both hands and multiple fingers simultaneously. Today you don't have phones withsupport for multi-touch only, both Dell and Toshiba released their tablets with,multi touch. Microsoft is alsr planning to release the New Windows 7 which is essentially Windows Vista with multi-touch option, Not yet officially disclosed, but we might see Windows 7 by next year or 2010.

How Multi- Touch works
Let's first understand how multitouch works and what the device level requirements are. Essentially there are two mechanisms that multi-touch uses. One is the touchscreen way, where a touchscreen is used as an interface and multiple fingers moving on the screen are captured and converted into commands. This technology is comparatively costlier that might not be available with each and every computing devices. So to make it more usable and cheaper, multiple cameras are used for recording the hand gestures and converting them into commands. This tech¬nology is far more cheaper and is easily upgradable to any existing computing device.