There’s no question multi-touch enabled hardware is going to be invading many homes and offices in the years to come, and it’s exciting to see how some software makers are already building applications that take full advantage of the multi-touch experience, aided by support baked into modern operating systems and increasingly powerful graphics processors.

But until today, I had’t really seen anyone boast a full-fledged multi-touch website yet.

Well, say hello to the future by visiting the new SilverPAC website, built by LA-based Ciplex in collaboration with Microsoft using Silverlight on Windows 7.

I just got off the phone with executives from the 10-year old interactive agency, and they told me they were actually commissioned by consumer electronics developer SilverPAC to build a new website with the usual technology. Instead, Ciplex saw an opportunity to take a stab at building a multi-touch web experience for the company using Silverlight tech, supported by the fact that its customer already had a working relationship with Microsoft. This gave Ciplex the early access to the Windows 7 beta and the set of Silverlight APIs needed to accomplish the feat.
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My daughter stopped by the office and I couldn’t help but let her play with the TouchSmart PC and BabySmash. What’s interesting is that she immediately goes for multi-touch and it looks as if the commands are translated to a “zoom” button on the keyboard being pressed etc.

This is a demonstration of the capabilities Dell XT Tablet with Windows 7 the next generation of Windows with multi-touch capabilities enabled. The touch events were captured and converted to TUIO messages for Flash and C# applications. Although these features are currently limited to SDK supplied by NTrig we were able to still leverage these features using wm_touch to TUIO interface. This platform can be used to easily develop programs that will use Multi-Touch features in the future Windows. Applications include AudioTouch, SimpleDesktop, WM2TUIO, CompuTable User Interface.

Microsoft’s top Windows business executive said Monday that for all his excitement about Windows 7, he doubts the release of the operating system will lead to a significant spike in PC sales.

“History would tell us that generally as you ship a Windows release into the market…the bump is very modest,” Microsoft senior vice president Bill Veghte said in a “fireside chat” at the UBS Global Technology and Services Conference. “You will see a little bit, but it is modest.”

Veghte announced last week that Microsoft plans to ship Windows 7 on Oct. 22. The company will also have a program in the coming weeks through which those who buy a new PC with Windows Vista will get a free or low-cost upgrade to Windows 7. A leaked memo from Best Buy suggests that the program will kick off at the end of this month.

On the business side, Veghte said that there is “very good enthusiasm around Windows 7,” but that will not be the biggest factor in the decision by corporations about when to upgrade their computers.

“It will get drowned by the macroeconomic environment,” he said in the speech, which was Webcast on Microsoft’s investor Web site. “As the macro environment comes back, people will have to buy new PCs. People aren’t using PCs any less.”

Veghte was pressed on whether Windows 7 will help Microsoft see improvement in the average selling price of Windows, which has taken a big hit because of the rise of Netbooks, a low-cost notebook PC variant.

“It’s pretty hard to tell,” Veghte said. “I think in this economic environment it is very hard to see us at the mix we had (during Windows XP and the beginning of Windows Vista). As we come out of the economic downturn it’s a very interesting question.”

Veghte was also asked about Microsoft’s recent cost-cutting effort and said it is something the company hasn’t done in the 19 years he’s been there. He said every expense has been questioned as to whether it is essential.

“It has been line by line,” Veghte said. “As a culture we’ve got to go through and really make the hard trade-offs. I think it’s a wonderful thing for the company, for the culture.”
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Video demo of the HP TouchSmart TX2 tablet PC running Windows 7 RC 64-bit with multi-touch features.

N-trig DuoSense™ Multi-Touch Beta Package (2.59) for Windows 7 Release Candidate

The DuoSenseTM multi-touch package for Windows 7 Release Candidate enables ISVs and developers to experience the Hands-onTM effect, and allows software applications to be developed with integral multi-touch capabilities.

In this package, more than two fingers can be used simultaneously as input devices.

This package supports Windows 7 protocol only. In Windows 7, multi-touch gesture-recognition is identified by the operating system.

If you are a developer and have DuoSense technology enabled and the Windows 7 RC (build 7100) version installed on either your Dell Latitude XT, your Latitude XT2 or your HP TouchSmart tx2, you can download and run the multi-touch package.

What is multi-touch?

Multi-touch gives the user the ability to use their hands to manipulate data and objects directly on the computer screen, enabling them to fully experience the Hands-on computingTM approach. DuoSense’s multi-touch technology provides a natural user interface, revolutionizing personal and professional computing and providing a better human interface.

Important Notes

Before downloading this package you must ensure that you read the N-trig DuoSense™ Multi-Touch Package for Windows 7 Release Candidate Release Notes for your computer.

For more information about the Dell Latitude XT, or Latitude XT2 please contact your Dell representative.

For more information about the HP TouchSmart tx2, please contact your HP representative.
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With a two-finger swipe, the video played faster and with three fingers it played faster still. Zhao even did his Mike Fratello impression, circling one of the players in red with another swirl of his finger, much as the “telestrator czar” does on TV.

In another corner of the cramped hallway that serves as the show floor, Canada’s GestureTek showed some of its wares. On the floor is the kind of display that has become common at malls and other places, while another setup featured a driving game that can be controlled with nothing but a user’s two hands, gesturing in mid-air.

It’s intuitive, but tricky to master. One uses their hands as a steering wheel, spreading their hands out to accelerate and bringing them together to slow down.

On stage, speakers discussed both new areas for exploration as well as the key hurdles the industry still faces–issues of cost, size, and accuracy.

As far as what’s in the future, one interesting topic had to do with displays that themselves can mold or “deform” themselves in response to touch.

Such technology is not here today, but is probably not more than three to five years out, said Christophe Ramstein, chief technology officer at Immersion, a company known for its force feedback technology. Ramstein said he is talking with a lot of large companies about the potential of that area.

“It’s a big area,” Ramstein said. “They are interested.”

In his speech, Han talked about what he and his company — Perceptive Pixel — are up to these days. Although a lot of the company’s business is in the industrial and government space, Han noted that his company has become best known for the touch wall systems it has sold to broadcasters like CNN, which used them in its election coverage.

“We actually didn’t think broadcast was an area for us,” Han said. “They found us at a military trade show.”

He also showed a clip of the “Saturday Night Live” parody of the election coverage, saying it makes an important point. “It’s a really fine line for us between something that really works…and falling into a gimmick,” Han said.

And while the show is small, the 270 attendees are more than the show’s organizers had expected, leading to a shortage of dishes, but an abundance of energy.

Speakers at the conference include big names like Microsoft and multitouch pioneer Jeff Han, while the small show floor serves as a showcase for start-ups, along with those that supply the base components needed to power touch screens and other interactive displays.
The success of Nintendo’s Wii and Apple’s iPod have shown the consumer appeal of devices that respond to human touch and movement, but a quick glance around the San Jose, California Hilton showed just how young the industry is.
Ashton Kutcher shows Demi Moore something on his Apple iPhone using the touch screen.

Ashton Kutcher shows Demi Moore something on his Apple iPhone using the touch screen.

While this week’s RSA 2009 show fills the Moscone Center a little ways up north in San Francisco, California, the Interactive Displays 2009 conference barely fills a mid-size ballroom here. Its show floor more closely resembles a science fair than the glitz of a big-time trade show.

But if you used one of the interactive displays here to show a heat map of this industry, it would glow red hot. That’s because touch displays, for years relegated to kiosks and industrial uses, are quickly becoming mainstream.

Hewlett-Packard and Dell already have touch-capable machines, while Microsoft is set to make gesture input standard with Windows 7.

Among those young companies is a San Jose-based outfit called 22miles. Like many of the companies here, its core business has been one-off projects for hotel displays. But the company is also hard at work on technologies that go way beyond powering an interactive directory.

With a swipe of his finger, CEO Joey Yu Zhao pulled up a prototype interactive TV application. A video of a basketball game started playing. Zhao used a finger to pause the game and then swiped his finger to play in slow motion.
Han also took the crowd on a bit of a journey back in time, reminding folks that while the multitouch business is young, its technology roots stretch back decades.

For his own part, Han said he was inspired by seeing a PBS documentary in the early 1980s that showed Microsoft researcher Bill Buxton, then at the University of Toronto, using multitouch to compose music on a computer. The computer itself was a green screen with an ancient processor and little memory, but the key underlying concept was already there.
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This message was sent to us from Brice Royer:

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Subject: Are you going to meet Jeff Han?

Hey,

Jeff Han will be appearing in San Jose! I just read the program for Interactive Displays 2009 and I’m really excited.

You can read the full story here: (Thanks Joan for the tip!)
http://www.int-displays.com

Keynoting the conference will be Jeff Han of Perceptive Pixel and Steven Bathiche, the guy that invented Microsoft Surface. There are lots of sessions on multi-touch development and plenty of product demos too!

The conference is being held in San Jose, California on April 21st – April 23rd, 2009. If you plan to attend, you’ll have a chance to meet Jeff and Steve. It’s going to be awesome.

It would be great to meet other multi-touch developers and designers at this conference. If you are going, please leave a comment!
Talk soon,
Brice Royer
Community Organizer

User experience (UX) principles can help you to effectively create software for multi-touch, multi-user, and gestural devices such as the Microsoft Surface. These new platforms bring new challenges, some that can be partially solved using current software design paradigms, but many that will require applying new ideas from the cutting edge of Interaction Design (IxD) and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Challenges related to these newer “co-present” (that is, users who share the same physical space) situations differ from the challenges software designers have long dealt with when needing to support physically distributed users.

Designing a good gesture or multi-touch based system is first and foremost about designing a good system that happens to be gesture or multi-touch based. Following a general overview of gesture, multi-touch, and multi-user systems, I explain in this article how you can leverage traditional UX designing for these new types of systems. Using four well-known user experience principles as a starting point — affordances, engagement, feedback, and not making people think — I explore how they can be applied to these new types of systems.

Gestures, Multi-touch, and Multi-user Systems

We’ve all grown up on mouse- and keyboard-based computers that one person uses at a time, but times are changing and so are computers. Gesture-based computers replace mouseclicks with finger taps. Going even further, multi-touch systems recognize multiple fingers and objects at once; for example, Microsoft Surface can currently recognize and track 52 fingers, objects, or tag identifiers at one time. The possibility of tracking so many fingers at once opens up the system for multiple concurrent users all standing around the computer touching (using) it at once, which is what we call “multi-user.”

With all of these new input capabilities come new design challenges. Imagine the complexity of keeping track of even just two users standing over a Microsoft Surface, facing each other. One of them places a camera down on the Surface that, through the magic of barcode-like tags, is recognized by one of the five cameras in the Surface. Each of the two users are standing at different orientations to the screen, and even if the tag on the camera identifies who it belongs to, how can the system know how to orient the pictures from the camera on the screen? And while touching or tapping a picture might be intuitive, how are you as the designer supposed to let these novice users know that they can actually use multiple fingers to shrink or grow the size of the pictures? And this is just about the simplest case you’ll find in this brave new world of gesture, multi-touch, and multi-user systems.

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Funny thing happened this week in the tech press. On Thursday, the Inquirer printed a story with the headline “Touch Screen Is the Future of Computing, Says Microsoft.” The very next day, Vnunet.com published another story headlined “Touch Screens Are Not the Future of Computing, Says HP.”

Microsoft is right. HP is wrong. Again.

In the 1970s, a talented young HP engineer invented a low-cost, highly efficient personal computer. He desperately wanted the company to fund and build the PC, and he pitched it passionately. If HP had more vision back then than it does now, the company would have allocated five million dollars and 30 engineers to the project, and would have leveraged in-house talent to become the driving force of the entire personal computing revolution. HP, however, saw no future in it, and rejected the engineer’s proposal in totality.

So Steve Wozniak left HP and joined up with Steve Jobs to found Apple, and the rest is history.

HP is kinda sorta making the same mistake again. HP’s CTO Phil McKinney proclaimed this week that touch computing, although interesting, is “not the future of computing,” and his reasons why reveal why he doesn’t understand it.

In the article, McKinney is quoted as saying that touch interfaces have “only limited use for desktops and laptops… and will not replace the keyboard and mouse.” Why, because users have to “reach over to use the screen” and that typing on glass is unpleasant.

Well there you go. HP, or at least McKinney, cannot see the future (again), which is why the company and the CTO don’t believe in touch.

Touch desktop PCs won’t be the idiotic laptops Microsoft and Dell have been showing, where the touch display is vertical, and the user has to hold his arm up to use it (unless in presentation or meeting mode). Touch desktop PCs will be like drafting tables and touch laptops will snap open flat for use in touch mode.

And they won’t prevent you from using keyboard and mouse, although you’ll be able to go without the mouse and use an on-screen keyboard when you want to. You’ll be able to pull out a cheap, wireless physical keyboard for real writing and, in the case of desktop PCs, it’ll rest right on the slanted touch display if you want.

And some of the chores now done by keyboard and mouse will be handled by voice command.

Just as much of HP’s multi-billion dollar business is now built upon the foundation of what the company rejected as having no future, in ten years time, much of HP’s business will be built around systems with touch interfaces.

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According to an outside developer, Microsoft is already working on the second generation of its multi-touch Surface computer, although the first is barely out.

Developer Joe Olsen, whose company Phenomblue writes applications for the Microsoft’s multi-touch Surface computer, has said he’s been told that a second generation of the device is in development and about two to three years away.

The first generation has barely been released commercially – it arrives in the UK next week, in fact. Microsoft was unable to confirm any release date for a second generation version.

The Surface is a flat-screen computer like a table that’s able to interpret multi-touch gestures, using cameras within the machine.

The second generation Surface has supposedly been dubbed Second Light, and will take the concept further by adding a second projector in the unit that can project a layer of images above the screen, the BBC reports. That would, for instance, allow one map to be superimposed on another.

The computer will also use infra-red sensors meaning users won’t have to actually touch the screen. Olsen said he’d been told by people at Microsoft that the new generation device was being worked on by the company’s R&D people.

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