When touch screen displays take over the world… 


It's not often you get to have a glimpse of the future. However, after watching this video demonstrating the use of a multi-point touch screen user interface, I couldn't help but think that this is the way we will all be using computers in the next five to ten years. 

Ever since working on touch screen applications for information kiosks and interactive exhibits at the At-Bristol exhibition and elsewhere, I've wondered why touch screen technology has never really taken off, as it seems the obvious way of interacting with on-screen visual content. However, practical problems including the durability of displays, the inevitable fingerprint problem, and limitations of the technology itself, such as poor accuracy and sensitivity, has prevented the widespread adoption of touch screens for the majority of IT applications. However, the recent availability of low-cost LCD displays, advanced screen coatings, and new multi-point touch detection looks set to change all that.

The revolutionary thing about these new screens is the ability to use two (or more!) hands, or multiple fingers to interact with what can only be described as a ‘visual control surface’. The gestures used to control zooming and resizing are particularly ingenious and consist of using both hands or thumb and forefinger to literally expand or compress the image element being viewed. This gesture is particularly intuitive as it's the one we would use in everyday life to indicate ‘smaller’ or ‘larger’, and its use in manipulating the Google Maps-like application in the video is simply stunning. The possibility of allowing more than one person to interact with the screen simultaneously is also intriguing and opens up a whole new world of applications in gaming, creativity and productivity software, as well as interactive artworks, such as the lava lamp and light swirl programs shown in the video.

I also liked the way that windows can not only be picked up and moved around but also rotated as if they were pieces of paper or photos sitting on a desk, which is of course what the desktop metaphor was supposed to achieve. Of course, all of this depends on the use of highly responsive, near-real-time graphics processing, but now that GPUs are becoming much more powerful, and both CPUs and the next generation of GPUs are moving to multi-core processors, this seems well within the bounds of possibility within the next few years.

Interestingly, Apple Computer has recently filed a patent for a gesture-based user interface that includes many of the above operations, and whose screen mock-ups look very much like iTunes, iPhoto and Google Maps. Mac analysts have speculated that this heralds the imminent arrival of a new touch-screen based iPod, although it's likely that such patents are also connected with Apple's ongoing research into tablet PCs, which could see the light of day some time in 2007 once the transition to the low power consumption Intel hardware is complete.

I've felt for a long time that the WIMP (windows-icons-menus and pointing device) interface is due for an overhaul, and that one obvious improvement would be the ability to literally pick up and drop windows onto the desktop, with their contents zooming in and out respectively. Apple's Exposé is a first step towards this as it provides real-time updating of all of the windows in your workspace while you switch between applications or documents. No doubt Microsoft's long awaited Vista operating system will follow suit, but wouldn't it be great if you could actually interact with the windows whilst they were in this zoomed out state? With the use of anti-aliasing and relatively high-resolution displays, this would effectively increase the available screen real-estate by several orders of magnitude, and allow for much more seamless operation. I'm sure that this possibility hasn't escaped the notice of the engineers at Apple who are hard at work on the next release of the company's Unix-based operating system, which is slated to include some major user interface enhancements… OS X Leopard, anybody?

Personally, I'll be happy when the day comes that I can say goodbye to my mouse and keyboard and switch to using a large desk-mounted interactive touch screen display. This is not only a much more natural and intuitive way of using a computer, but also less stressful on the joints, and potentially a lot more fun which, after all, can't be a bad thing, can it?


(P.S. If you're wondering why this blog or my main web site hasn't been updated for some time, it's because I'm working on a new version of the site, which has been designed using Apple's new iWeb application. More info soon…) 

Posted on Sunday - February 12, 2006 at 09:23 AM            

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