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.