Multi-touch Technology Gains Momentum

Touch is the most direct and intuitive interface we have. Ask any parent and they'll tell you that the human "I want that!" point-and-grab reflex is innate and very strong. Touch in the PC world is the ability for users to interact directly with on-screen objects by touching the screen with their fingers. Today, this mostly takes the form of single-touch mouse cursor control, but with technology transitions happening now, touch is going mainstream, with richer user experience. In the near future, we will be able to perform much more complex and intuitive touch interactions. 'Multi-touch' is an industry buzzword and, like most of them, can mean very different things depending on who is making the claims.

Choosing the Best Touch Technology

A number of different touch technologies are available today. Resistive touch, as used on PDAs and most touch tablets, is the most widely recognized touch technology. Resistive touch has the benefit of being low-cost and easy to implement. It is almost exclusively single-touch and can be easily identified by the need to apply pressure on the screen to activate it.

On the multi-touch front, there are many choices, each with particular strengths and weaknesses. Top considerations for Dell are balancing best-in-class customer experience with cost. Windows® 7 enables flexibility in choice of underlying technology. On the Dell™ Latitude™ XT2  and the Dell Studio One 19, (optical infrared) we use capacitive touch, which is more complex and expensive to implement, but has significant usability advantages. Capacitive touch does not require pressure to activate, so the system responds to the lightest of touches.

In contrast, resistive touch technology relies on bending the top surface of the digitizer to touch the next layer down, requiring a soft top layer that is prone to wear. Resistive touch users tend to gravitate toward using a fingernail on the screen, which is the most intuitive finger touch method, but causes wear on the screen. This problem is avoided by the capacitive touch screen, which has no moving parts.

Using Multi-touch 'Gestures'

For the future, the greatest advantage of multi-touch is the ability to recognize multiple simultaneous touches, enabling a true multi-touch experience. Dell pioneered multi-touch with the release of the industry-first convertible tablet PC with multi-touch capabilities with the Latitude XT in July 2008 by taking advantage of that capability to deliver multi-touch gestures to applications that were originally written with no concept of touch screens at all. With Windows 7 release, it will go mainstream.

Touch interface pioneer, Bill Buxton, observed that, “Everything is best for something, and worst for something else.” Touch is extremely good for object manipulations — selection, movement, arrangement and the like. It’s not so good for tasks like writing or data entry. There’s a reason Leonardo da Vinci used a brush and not finger paint! Some of my favorite touch uses include navigating around Google™ Earth with finger movements, flipping through documents and hitting the 'snooze' button in Outlook® reminder dialogs. Casual gaming is also a great place for touch. It's very easy to run up a huge score on games that require fast clicking all around the screen. For novice users, touch is very intuitive, much more so than moving a mouse.

Looking Ahead

Right now, multi-touch is breaking free of one-mouse, one-pointer paradigm, and expanding into more intuitive and natural interactions. It's all about the experience. The next big hurdle is the software needed to take advantage of multi-touch capabilities. Microsoft® is planning some great touch features in Windows 7 and will be integrating APIs so that software providers will have an easier time touch-enhancing their products. Hardware wise, in a few years, we will be able to integrate a multi-touch digitizer onto the liquid crystal display (LCD) itself. That could drive touch into many more products. The future of touch is limited only by our imagination and creativity.

Blog entries: Multi-touch blog entries on Direct to Dell