Thursday Jun 7 2007 - 5:21pm
Multi-touch Surfaces, Oh My!
by Brian
under games, news, technology
with 7 comments
I’m not sure where all the new subscribers have been coming from given our past dormancy, but to everyone new, welcome! Our beloved professor Mark Chang has a great piece on multi-touch surfaces over at his blog. Well I suppose that since we’ve graduated, he’s technically not our professor anymore and just “a terrifyingly smart and cool dude we happen to know.” Regardless, he’s got some great analysis on the recent media brouhaha over multi-touch devices since Microsoft dropped the Surfaces (warning: Flash) bomb. Yippee. Multi-touch. You mean like, this one?
And this one?
Or the tasty Warcraft 3 version here.
Can you imagine standing at these big screens thing all day long trying to do real work? Yikes. Besides needing a set of Dansko clogs and a rubber mat to keep my feet happy, how about your arms? I guess it would be an interesting way to get legions of pasty, geeky, wimpy (generalizing here, folks) computer folks like myself to at least get some arm strength. Strap on some weights and we have a real workout here.
Purveyors of these large tables and walls, often use terms like, “visualize”, “analyze”, “collaborate”, when describing the use cases for there products. (I took those words right off the front page of TouchTable.com, just so you know. Which, by the way, was a touch table long before there were cool YouTube videos of touch tables popping up every day.) But almost every demo has either people pan/zooming terrain, or pushing around photos like a digital light table. Yawn.
He’s got a good point. Who is gonna be using this thing in the near future besides battlefield planners and exorbitantly rich gamers? (Or people who want to build really cool bars - I’ll spare you embedding a fourth video)
All in all, this kind of reminds me of the Optimus Keyboard.
Expensive toys that aren’t really going to be hitting the mainstream anytime soon, compared to the bombshell that’s destroying us on June 29th. At the very least, it’s nice to see an industry besides gaming push the tech envelope for once. (And these devices make that brand new Nvidia card look like pocket change in comparison…)
I’ll take 3.
1
Right on.
Actually, I think the biggest use for these things will be as an interactive advertising gimmick. I think they’re cool enough to make up their cost before the novelty wears off, and useful enough to keep around after that. It seems that Microsoft won’t even be making these available to the public, at least not right away.
(Which is sad because I want one. A lot.)
2
(Trackback)
alwaysBETA » Scratch That, Forget Surfaces - I Want Photosynth
[…] « Multi-touch Surfaces, Oh My! […]
3
Actually, this technology is fairly readily available to consumers. The Lenovo X Series tablets feature a multi-touch display.
4
(Post Author)
Huh… I see where it says multi-touch display, but I don’t see where it describes anything other than using a pen to interact with the screen. Do you know what it uses multi-touch for?
5
I have no idea what sort of software implementation supports Lenovo’s multi-touch product, but I did at least find this indication that fingers are a usable input device.
6
I think I may have gotten too excited. The innovation here appears to be that one finger can be used, as opposed to zero. Not two or more.
7
(Post Author)
Oh, that’s too bad. Maybe they meant multi-touch as in pen or finger. Shrug.