The birth of multi-touch technology and a matter of application

This is post 300 of this blog, I am quite amazed at the number of posts I have made thus far over my 2 year span of running this blog. The amount of content I have written for this blog is likely sufficient to fill a book or two if it were ever printed. An interesting thought, but anyways, back to the main post.

Approximately a year ago, a man by the name of Jeff Han at New York University made his pioneering presentation of multi-touch technology in February of 2006 at the TED talks conference which blew the audience away. Interestingly, multi-touch technology is nothing new as known experimental work on this technology dates back to 2001 under the auspices of the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory, branded as DiamondTouch. Unfortunately, DiamondTouch never made the same level of impact as Jeff Han's presentation.

An important lesson to learn here is that technology is only as valuable as it's usefulness; and it's usefulness is defined by it's application (or it's perceived application, "coolness" counts as an application). Where Mitsubishi failed, Jeff Han has done an exemplary job of making multi-touch technology useful as it is cool, as witnessed by his TED presentation (which I highly recommend you to see). It's applications include fast manipulation of satellite images, planetary topographical maps and a variety of entertainment applications. Of course, a 5 year late start might have provided Jeff Han with an edge over Mitsubishi in computing power, in addition to the current availability of satellite data and CPU processing power.

The application possibilities for this technology is exciting and nearly a year after that presentation, Microsoft has moved into developing multi-touch systems christened Surface, which is pretty much a carbon copy of Jeff Han's technology. Perhaps they've got a licensing deal with Jeff Han? I'll leave that up to speculation.

The only drawback to the current state of multi-touch technology is that it can possibly somewhat unwieldy when it comes to manipulating data on a full screen. Considering that I can use a mouse to access the full range of my monitor on a surface area less than 1/5 of my screen, access time to manipulating data on a large screen will be significantly slower. I do believe that there are ways of speeding up how our ability to interact with these systems. I will predict that touch screen technology will become mainstream in the next 7~8 years.