The idea of multi-touch is that instead of a touch screen only being able to understand one touch, it can understand as many as it wants. Most people now will have come across touch screens more than once, especially with the new self service machines in Tesco. The people, who are more familiar with touch screens and use them every day, will have probably at one point tried to see if you could touch two places at once, and found that it does not work.
Companies have been experimenting with multi-touch for some time now, starting in the 80’s it was in its early stages, about a year ago I saw a video on the internet with a person demonstrating the possibilities with a multi touch screen and more recently I saw a demonstration of the iPhone and noticed straight away that multi-touch had finally arrived.
The main example of multi-touch technology today is seen in apple iPhones and iPod touches, this technology allows users to scroll through music with a flick of a finger, and the ‘pinch’ allows user to zoom in and out of web pages, pictures and maps.
Multi-touch also means multi-user, on a larger scale than the iPhone or iPod touch many people could use the same device at the same time. This has been something nearly impossible with regular devices and computers. An example of the future possibilities of multi-touch can be seen in the “Microsoft Surface”.
Microsoft Surface is a product that will soon be seen in restaurants, phone shops and hotels. To look at you would think it was a coffee table but really it is a powerful computer with a large multi-touch screen. To see a demonstration of this product is like watching those adverts showing what everybody would love, when I saw an advert showing the possibilities I was sure that nothing like it could exist today, but when I watched the demonstration I was pleasantly surprised. Really to get the full idea you have to watch an online demonstration of it so I will not talk about it too much. The main thing behind it is being able to recognise objects placed on the screen, be it a credit card you can pay with or an mp3 player it can sync with.
It is all very promising stuff, hopefully soon we will be seeing multi-touch tablets on our desks and Microsoft Surfaces in our living rooms, and of course filing our pockets with iPhones or iPod touches.
