Multi Touch Interaction
Multi Touch Patent By Apple Computers for Interactive Screens
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Exclusive information on Multi Touch Input. See the Video NowSee Video of Amazing Mult-Touch Interaction Technology from NYU Researchers |
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Blog, Incredible Video Screenshots Look at screenshots of video demo of NYU researchers and discuss this new technology's capabilities. |
Multi touch interactive LCDs and monitors will soon be prevalent in everyday life. So, here are some real, working examples of how multi touch interactive screens are used today.
Multi Touch at DiamondTouch
In June 2003 a DiamondTouch table was installed in the lobby area of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), an industrial research lab. The table is at coffee-table height, and centered amongst four comfortable leather chairs, representative of a typical waiting area or lounge (Figure 1). It is situated in a high-traffic area across from the receptionist's desk. The applications running on the table include a Page 2 set of multi-user games along with a set of new research demos. The games run unsupervised, and most visitors play them with little or no instructions. The games range in style from collaborative to competitive; they include E-Magnetic Poetry, in which users manipulate virtual magnets to create poems either independently or collaboratively, Pop-A-Bubble, an electronic version of Whack-A-Mole in which players compete against each other, and CircleMaze [1], a collaborative interactive maze. Hundreds of lab visitors, everyone from technologists to university students to researchers' children, have passed through MERL's lobby and casually interacted with this table over the past two years.
Multi Touch Research at Stanford University
At Stanford University, we have developed TeamTag, a multi-user tabletop interface that supports collaboration among bio-diversity researchers. One to four researchers sit around the table to browse, label, and search through digital photographs of flora and fauna taken during field expeditions. Photos can be moved about the table, reoriented to face different members of the group, resized to view different levels of detail, and organized into piles. Labeling these images collaboratively allows the researchers to bring their collective expertise to bear on identifying the subjects of the photographs. About ten biologists have been observed using the system, in sessions ranging from thirty minutes to three hours in length. The table is at desk height, with people seated at the table with their legs underneath.
Multi touch at Nextfest
Organized by WIRED magazine, the three-day NextFest 2004 [20] was designed to give the general public a close-up, hands-on view of innovative technology. We brought two tables to this conference, which were part of the Future of Design Pavilion. During the course of this event, the tables were used by almost 2,000 people. Visitors included children, educators, executives, designers, and engineers. On one table, the software included a general-purpose application where people view images and create text (Figure 3), an educational game called Habitat (in which multiple people match pictures of animals to pictures of their home environments: land, forest, sea, or ice floes), and a finger-paint program in which multiple people draw together on a large digital canvas. On a second table, we ran a set of multi-user games, a subset of the games included on the lobby table described in Section 2.1. Both tables were at desk height, with people seated with their legs underneath.
Multi Touch at GeoINT
GeoINT is a two-day symposium organized by the National GeoSpatial Agency to foster collaboration and interoperability amongst technology providers in the sector of geospatial exploration, analysis, and presentation applications. We demonstrated a multi-user map application, DTLens, in which we used the IDELIX's PDT lens API (www.idelix.com) for data exploration (Figure 4). Up to four users can simultaneously open and use personalized zooming lenses on geospatial map or diagrammatic data. Several hundreds visitors, all from the geospatial information analysis community, interacted with our tabletop application.