Multi-Touch Interface Research

Bill Buxton is Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research in Toronto. Since 1994 he writing on his book Human Input to Computer Systems: Theories, Techniques and Technology, where the manuscript is available online. It will be a valuable ressource for my project.

In his recent article Multi-Touch Systems that I have Known and Loved (updated February 9, 2007), Buxton shares his decades of experience and gives a realistic view on the current multi-touch hype.

He points out that it takes 30 years for an input device to hit the tipping point and become ubiquitous. Certainly nobody expects that mulit-touch input will ever become ubiquitous, but multi-touch interaction has already a 25 year long history. But more important is that multi-touch may be perfect for a certain kind of applications, but will never replace the mouse or keyboard. It is a great research task now to find applications where multi-touch is an advantage (an area where Jeff Han has gained much ground during the last one and a half years). Buxton also points out the interesting fact that displays have improved significantly until now, but “input is still primitive, and wide open for improvement”. So let’s get on it.

Buxton gives a chronology of multi-touch related work, starting in 1982 (25 years ago!), listing all known research projects and products since then. Recent DIY projects (like tangent) are not included of course, that would be too much. But it shows that all of this is not brand-new and that I can build upon a lot of research results already. Jeff Han also pointed out the history of multi-touch in his famous paper “Low-Cost Multi-Touch Sensing through Frustrated Total Internal Reflection” from October 2005 (where he quotes Buxton in the references, by the way), and traced touchscreens back to first experiments in the 70ies.

The article is really a must-read for anyone dealing with multi-touch technologies, as is the book. So that’s on top of my reading list right now.

There seem to be a lot of open-source projects for multi-touch tables or walls by now. I guess there must be about 100 private initiatives in Europe alone, because not everybody goes online with photos or a blog. There is definitely more material around than there was half a year ago, and I believe there will be a complete description with all required materials and instructions available soon. One of these ressources is nuigroup.com with a blog, a wiki that explains hard- and software and a forum. Also, there is an IRC channel (irc.freenode.net #ftir) to discuss multitouch tables – among other things. And a lot of people – e.g. the c-base MultiTouchConsole from Berlin – are happy to share their knowledge, which is great.

A lot of these projects are documented on flickr too, you just have to check out all public photos tagged with multitouch (231 right now). But I’ve noticed that there is no group that collects them all and where a discussion can be opened, so I have created the flickr Multi-Touch group, which is open to everyone of course and you are invited to join.

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