Multi-touch
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Multi-touch is an enhancement to touchscreen technology, which provides the user with the ability to apply multiple finger gestures simultaneously onto the electronic visual display to send complex commands to the device. The term multi-touch is a trademark of Apple Inc.[1]
Multi-touch has been implemented in several different ways, depending on the size and type of interface. Both touchtables and touch walls project an image through acrylic or glass, and then backlight the image with LED's. When a finger or an object touches the surface, causing the light to scatter, the reflection is caught with sensors or cameras that send the data to software which dictates response to the touch, depending on the type of reflection measured. Touch surfaces can also be made pressure-sensitive by the addition of a pressure-sensitive coating that flexes differently depending on how firmly it is pressed, altering the reflection.[2] Handheld technologies use a panel that carries an electrical charge. When a finger touches the screen, the touch disrupts the panel's electrical field. The disruption is registered and sent to the software, which then initiates a response to the gesture.[3]
In the past few years, several companies have released products that use multitouch. In an attempt to make the expensive technology more accessible, hobbyists have also published methods of constructing DIY touchscreens.[4]
History
The use of touch technology to control electronic devices predates the personal computer. Early synthesizer and electronic instrument builders like Hugh Le Caine and Bob Moog experimented with using touch-sensitive capacitance sensors to control the sounds made by their instruments.[5] IBM began building the first touch screens in the late '60's, and, in 1972, Control Data released the PLATO IV computer, a terminal used for educational purposes that employed single-touch points in a 16x16 array as its user interface.[5]
Multi-touch technology began in 1982, when the University of Toronto's Input Research Group developed the first human-input multi-touch system. The system used a frosted-glass panel with a camera placed behind the glass. When a finger or several fingers pressed on the glass, the camera would detect the action as one or more black spots on an otherwise white background, allowing it to be registered as an input. Since the size of a dot was dependent on pressure (how hard the person was pressing on the glass), the system was somewhat pressure-sensitive as well.[5]
In 1983, Bell Labs at Murray Hill published a comprehensive discussion of touch-screen based interfaces.[6] In 1984, Bell Labs engineered a touch screen that could change images with more than one hand. In 1985, the University of Toronto group including Bill Buxton developed a multi-touch tablet that used capacitance rather than bulky camera-based optical sensing systems.[5]
A breakthrough occurred in 1991, when Pierre Wellner published a paper on his multi-touch “Digital Desk”, which supported multi-finger and pinching motions.[7][8]
Various companies expanded upon these inventions in the beginning of the twenty-first century. Mainstream exposure to multi-touch technology occurred in the year 2007, when Microsoft released its Microsoft Surface and Apple unveiled the iPhone . Small-scale touch devices are rapidly becoming commonplace, with the amount of touch screen telephones expected to increase from 200,000 shipped in 2006 to 21 million in 2012.[9] More robust and customizable multi-touch and gesture-based solutions are beginning to become available, with interfaces that register multiple touchpoints and gestures. Recently, Displax unveiled a new approach to multitouch that also detects airflow movement. According to Daniel Wigdor, a user experience architect for Microsoft who focuses on multitouch and gestural computing, “If Displax can do this for larger displays, it will really be one of the first companies to do what we call massive multitouch (...) If you look at existing commercial technology for large touch displays, they use infrared camera that can sense only two to four points of contact. Displax takes us to the next step.[10]
Major brands and manufacturers
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Many companies in recent years have expanded into multitouch, with systems designed for everything from the casual user to multinational organizations. Laptop manufacturers have begun to include multitouch trackpads on their laptops, as well as constructing tablet PC's that respond to touch input rather than traditional stylus input. In the wake of the iPhone, several mobile phone manufacturers have begun to replace traditional push-button interfaces with multitouch interfaces on their handheld devices as well. So far, such innovations are mostly restricted to the higher-end smartphones used for web browsing and computing in addition to phone-based functions. A few companies are focusing on large-scale surface computing rather than personal electronics, either large multitouch tables or wall surfaces. These systems carry a hefty price tag and are generally used by government organizations, museums, and companies as a means of information or exhibit display.
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Software
Many recent operating systems support multitouch, including Mac OS X, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition and Ubuntu (since version 7.10), Google's Android, Palm's webOS and Xandros.
Popular culture references
Pop culture has also portrayed potential uses of multi-touch technology in the future, including several installments of the Star Trek franchise.
The television series CSI: Miami introduced both surface and wall multitouch displays in its sixth season. Another form of a multi-touch computer was seen in the motion picture,The Island, where the professor, played by Sean Bean, has a multi-touch desktop to organize files, based on an early version of Microsoft Surface[1]. Multitouch technology can also be seen in the James Bond film, Quantum of Solace, where MI6 uses a touch interface to browse information about the criminal Dominic Greene.[11] In a parodic episode of the popular TV series The Simpsons, when Lisa Simpson travels to the underwater headquarters of Mapple to visit Steve Mobs, the erstwhile pretender to the throne of Mapple is shown to be performing multiple multi-touch hand gestures on a large touch wall.
A device similar to the Surface was seen in the 1982 movie Tron. It took up an executive's entire desk and was used to communicate with the Master Control computer.
The interface used to control the alien ship in the movie District 9 features such similar technology.[12]
See also
- List of Multi-Touch Computers and Monitors
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Pen computing
- Surface Computing
- Natural User Interface
References
- ^ Apple Trademark List
- ^ Scientific American. 2008. "How It Works: Multitouch Surfaces Explained" (accessed January 9, 2010.)
- ^ Brandon, John. 2009. "How the iPhone Works
- ^ "http://www.humanworkshop.com/index.php?modus=e_zine&sub=articles&item=99 "DIY Multi-touch screen"
- ^ a b c d Buxton, Bill. "Multitouch Overview"
- ^ Nakatani, L. H., John A Rohrlich (1983). "Soft Machines: A Philosophy of User-Computer Interface Design". Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’83): 12–15. Retrieved 2009-01-28.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ^ Wellner, Pierre. 1991. The Digital Desk. YouTube video
- ^ Pierre Wellner's papers via DBLP
- ^ Wong, May. 2008. Touch-screen phones poised for growth http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2007-06-21-1895245927_x.htm (Accessed April 2008).
- ^ "Displax multitouch technology – Wired". www.wired.com. Retrieved 2010-02-02.
- ^ 2009. " Quantum of Solace Multitouch UI"
- ^ District 9 at IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1136608/
External links
- Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known and Loved – An overview by researcher Bill Buxton of Microsoft Research, formerly at University of Toronto and Xerox PARC.
- The Unknown History of Pen Computing contains a history of pen computing, including touch and gesture technology, from approximately 1917 to 1992.
- Annotated bibliography of references to pen computing
- Multi-touch in Windows 7
- Multi-Touch Interaction Research @ NYU
- Camera-based multi-touch for wall-sized displays
- David Wessel Multitouch
- The Virtual Autopsy Table
- Jeff Han's Multi Touch Screen's chronology archive Debut from 7 Mar 2006 to present