Dear Developers: No More Multi-Touch Photo Albums

Some of you may or may not be aware of one of the biggest fads to hit the tech community in recent years. If you haven’t heard about multi-touch click the link to see what Wikipedia has to say about the technology. The first paragraph is a concise introduction.

What we’ve got here is probably a technology with more potential for changing how we interact with computers more than any other innovation since the mouse. Yet all we have seen so far is high-end and fairly useless applications for the average consumer. Such as the Microsoft Surface. While it’s a great idea none of us are going to be shelling out about $10,000 anytime soon. The absurdity of this is captured almost perfectly in a Youtube Parody video.

What bothers me is the limited scope of potential uses for this kind of technology that the industry seems to acknowledge as well as the overall sluggish adoption. Technology has been developed in the that allows for inexpensive Multi-Touch table design. Personally I was able to make an extremely simplistic multi-touch panel(it didn’t display video but the computer reacted to my touch) by using a picture frame, cardboard box and an old web camera. What I began to wonder was why haven’t we seen the practical adoption of Multi-Touch tables?

For the most part every video I’ve posted here has used the photo album as an example of this technology’s usefulness, which is my biggest point of contention right now. There is so much more that could be done with multi-touch screens and software. It’s been about 3 years since we saw the emergence of practical multi-touch interfaces and there has been next to zero commercial interest. I personally believe part of the reason is consumers do not know what is possible and therefore there is no demand in the market.

What I’d like to see is developers look for practical applications of multi-touch hardware and software. Below I have several concepts I’d love to see employed or advanced in the multi-touch arena.

• Custom pseudo-keyboards/interfaces
  • Some of you may have seen the Optimus Maximus, the keyboard where every key is a small color screen. Right now priced around $1600. This type of technology could be easily simulated by multi-touch technology. Even having a physical keyboard frame similar to the nearly flat Mac keyboards but made of clear plastic that you set on the table surface the keyboard itself could be projected through the clear plastic for tactile sensation of a keyboard but retaining the novelty of the Optimus Maximus.
  • The creation of other interfaces using Optical Recognition Markers allowing users to place physical objects on the tables and have them interact with the computer through the objects. Ideally we would see something like this ReacTable game that was created. I believe this is by far one of the most practical application we’ve seen to date.

• Education
  • Collaborative education platforms. A commercial multi-touch surface has already found its way into elementary schools today! Now if we could build a system like this with open source standards, education and computer science students could collaborate together on new innovative software for these systems. It’s a win/win situation.

• Home and Business Applications
  • Dining room multi-touch table. Imagine coming down to dinner with your family and having what appears to be a slightly chunky kitchen table light up as you sit down. Every seat at the table has it’s own taskbar oriented to their position so all the windows are right-side-up. If Dad wants to share a news article with Mom he just “flicks” it across the table to her.
  • The same table could be used later that evening for a game of Clue, Risk or any other game that has been digitized. The use of Optical Recognition Markers could allow for physical cards and pieces to be used on top of the table and would interact with the game itself. If a group is unfamiliar with the rules of a particular game, the table itself could teach them as they played, allowing you to sample new games more often as the learning curve is reduced.
  • Perhaps a slightly larger model could be used at a corporate meeting. Users would have all their documents easily accessible digitally and could just drag and drop the document in question onto icons representing everyone at the table. Just fly in from Cincinnati and only have a hardcopy? Laying it on a table such as this would allow the table to “scan” the document in only a few seconds allowing you to pass it alone to everyone. Schedules could be examined as a group, tasks could be set up and assigned right there, updating everyones personal calenders with new deadlines, perhaps even including the audio from the meeting while the task was being drawn up.

Really there is so much that could be done with this type of innovation. I don’t see why we are dead set on only developing photo applications and smokey widgets. If operating systems could be patched or software could be released to handle multi-touch hardware input and if a firm would work on an inexpensive hardware multi-touch screen like the DIY models that are strewn about youtube we’d see the number of practical multi-touch applications explode. Just picture a beer pong table that can play video and keep score while you play the game. Ah, now you’re interest! There’s a useful/enjoyable application of this technology for almost everyone. We just need a few good minds to stop playing with their photo albums and get to it….

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