Lots of people are excited about multi-touch these days. The
iPhone allows you to interact in a picture by pinching or squeezing
it. Microsoft is working on "surface" a table that allows you
interact by touch (and also pay by placing your credit card on it
and dragging a receipt to the card). For anyone that didn't catch
the
video of Jeff Han's multi-touch screen, you can see it here.
The point is that you can touch multiple locations at once and the
screen picks up. My point is its "hard" to do and probably
expensive. Now, I'm not going to argue that this sample is of the
same quality or that it is as commercially viable. I do think that
it accomplishes the same concept with a completely different set of
constraints. Instead of saying "hey, multi-touch is hard and
expensive" he started with: "I want multi-touch. How can I do it
myself." (I suspect that there is probably also a constraint about
hardware as he uses very simple hardware and isn't hacking open LCD
screens or anything.) The video: At this point, all the multi-touch
input is, from a useful UI standpoint, either limited (iPhone) or
undeveloped and just sample (MS, Jeff Han). I think that once we
start having the interface available, then we'll really see what we
can do with it. What do widgets and buttons look like if they are
for multi-touch instead of a mouse? What about games? What about
web pages and web browsing? Related (UI): moving around Google Maps with
Atlas gloves Update (Sept 26): Signals vs. Noise found this
video, with the comment: "So cool to see this sort of innovative
thinking and embrace of constraints." http://urltea.com/1las?SVNMultiTouch