Multi-touch is something we’re hearing a lot about on a weekly basis and it involves being able to touch an LCD panel or touch screen panel with two fingers and have both finger pressure points being not only seen but usable so you can do things with more than one finger.
Multi-touch isn’t new, many manufacturers have been using it, for instance Apple have multi-touch on the iPhone and iPod Touch. You can have multiple fingers on-screen gaming using virtual controllers, and you can also use other nice features like pinch to zoom.
So how will multi-touch change our lives I hear you say?
Well, like all old technology that disappears over time, the mouse input that we have on PC’s and Mac’s is very antiquated. You would think in the last 20 or 30 years that we would have designed multi-mice or track balls so you could have two pointers on-screen and use both hands, e.g. left hand to move one mouse or trackball pointer and right hand to move another mouse or trackball pointer.
The problem with many of the operating systems to date is they still don’t support multiple inputs of the same type. They do support multiple inputs though, like you can use the keyboard and the mouse at the same time, you just can’t use two mice because it will involve two pointers on screen. Probably one of the reasons we don’t have two mouse pointers is that it’s going to be difficult to work out which pointer is doing what on screen. Then the operating system needs to understand are you left clicking with one mouse pointer and right clicking with the other mouse pointer. It gets quite complicated.
Here’s where multi-touch is changing our lives already and will ultimately be the killer of the mouse. Why use an antiquated device like a mouse or a trackball to control something on-screen? It’s very unnatural to do this and the more natural to just touch the screen in multiple places. The downside with touch is that you can’t left click or right click, but you can hold your finger pressure on a subject for a second or more that could bring up a right click context.
Apple are one of the main companies that has designed multi-touch to be very sweet and to the degree that most people don’t even understand the technology is actually there on their iPhone or iPod Touch as it works extremely well and doesn’t inhibit you in anyway. That’s how technology should be, it shouldn’t be something that stands out and gets in your way, it should be something that’s subtle but effective.
Multi-touch will make us more productive and increase productivity, and multi-touch might go from two or 4 pressure points to 10 or 20 over the next few years. Microsoft have also been pushing the boundary with Microsoft Surface which is a massive table top screen that allows for multi-touch.
Apple have also recently incorporated the same multi-touch that they have in the iPhone and iPod Touch into the new Apple iPad to bring multi-touch to a much bigger 10″ screen. Other companies have tried to implement multi-touch but many still haven’t implemented it to the same quality or accuracy as Apple has.
