You may know Jeff Han, you’ve probably seen his company Perceptive Pixel’s Interactive Media Wall / Multi-touch Collaboration Wall, but the missing link to this stuff is taking it home. Well, the wait is apparently over, and for once it’s Neiman Marcus we’ve got to thank. While you’re shopping for the latest

must-have fall fashions, be sure to stop by the newly anointed Futuristic Displays That Don’t Belong at Neiman Marcus Shop to pick up your 8 x 3-foot multi-touch display for a cool $100,000 US, only ten times the price of Microsoft’s

forthcoming Surface. Don’t worry, your family will appreciate your investment; trust us, we really think they’d far prefer it to, say, Christmas presents, a home to live in, or dinner at some point in 2008.

Touch computing isn’t new by any stretch of the imagination. It’s been around for more than three decades. If you think that’s a lot, the mouse took about three decades before it caught on with the average computer user. Today touch computing is commonplace on most notebooks (touchpads). Nevertheless when you talk of touch computing most folks think of touch screens and using your fingers to manipulate information directly on the display. This kind of interactivity made its mainstream debut with the iPhone and Microsoft Surface. With other initiatives aimed at bringing multi-touch to a wider range of devices, touch computing poised to become a popular way of interacting with a computer.

Touch computing as exemplified by the iPhone or Surface supports multi-touch, which means that the display can sense more than one finger (or in the case of Surface Computing more than one person’s fingers), and react accordingly. This allows you to use gestures like pinch or zoom to manipulate photos or Web pages. Surface recognizes devices such as digital cameras and mobile phones placed on it allowing you to perform tricks such as dragging photos from a camera to a phone with your fingers.

While these are nice tricks, how useful is multi-touch going to be? That depends on what you use it for. As far as availability goes, multi-touch support will be built into the next generation of trackpads and Windows 7 is going to support it. That should put the technology within reach of a lot more people than it already is over the course of the next few years. That said, multi-touch and touch computing are not a panacea for everything that you can do on a computer. A finger isn’t the most precise tool for anything more than simple tasks. For instance, you wouldn’t use your finger to sketch, you would use a pencil. Similarly, a stylus gives you better precision than your finger can. Another problem with using your finger is that it blocks whatever’s below it.

That’s not to say that touch computing isn’t useful. It does have applications in enabling more natural interaction with computing devices and implemented properly it can be very useful indeed. We’ll see more of touch computing as device makers use it to create more innovative and usable devices.

Recent developments include Microsoft Sidesight that attempts to overcome the limitations of touch screens on compact devices by capturing gestures that happen near a device using infrared proximity sensors to do just that. This lets you scroll through Web pages, say, on a phone without actually touching the screen. Then there’s SecondLight which builds on Surface to let you layer different views of an object by holding semi-transparent sheets over a Surface computer—you could view the blueprint of a building on the main display and the actual building on the sheet you are holding over the display.

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N-trig, providers of DuoSense(TM) technology - combining pen and capacitive touch in a single device - announced their offering of an in-the-box suite of multi-touch solutions for Windows 7. N-trig’s multi-touch technology will be demonstrated on a Windows 7 platform at WinHEC, booth number 502.

N-trig’s pen and multi-touch technology offers all the benefits of Hands-on computing(TM) (HOC) as a natural and intuitive experience. N-trig’s efforts in the HOC space has resulted in reaching new heights of personal and professional computing, and continues to push the envelope of many standard features. These advances are built on N-trig’s current work with Windows operating systems.

“Working with Microsoft, we are building the infrastructure that is fueling HOC innovation in the PC marketplace,” said Amihai Ben David, CEO of N-trig. “With this foundation in place, ISVs can now create new applications to further enhance the usability and reduce the barriers between people and computers. Additionally, these software advancements give OEMs a high level of interactivity for a dynamic interface that will open up further avenues for development.”

“We’re excited to bring multi-touch to Windows 7 to create a unique experience for customers to easily search for information, navigate web pages and locate files all at their fingertips,” said Gary Schare, Director of Hardware Ecosystem Product Management at Microsoft Corp. “N-trig’s DuoSense technology is key to enabling multi-touch experiences by allowing customers a natural way to interact directly with computing devices through a touch of a finger.”

N-trig’s DuoSense technology offers cutting edge mobility and productivity, hand-in-hand with the convenience, usability and familiarity of the Microsoft world. Combined, these technologies will open a window to a world where multi-touch is the standard for computer interfaces.

About N-trig

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Marc Cieslak looks at three new ways to use a computer that go beyond the traditional mouse and keyboard.By ditching that basic interface for touch, gestures or mind control inventors hope to improve the way people can interact with a machine.

TOUCH SCREEN

Users could one day manipulate applications through touch

Some handheld devices such as MP3 players and mobile phones have already embraced touch screens.

While their usefulness is apparent with pocket-sized devices it is, so far, less clear that they would work well with a desktop computer or a laptop.

In 2007, Microsoft showed off a touch screen interface it imaginatively named Surface. Ultimately it wants to go beyond a table-mounted touch screen to something bigger such as a wall-mounted display.

Jeff Hann from Perceptive Pixel has come up with a multi-touch screen that lets a user manipulate several applications by making simple gestures.

He believes “intuitive” interfaces could make tech more accessible to “non-computer experts”.

“We are all familiar with the mouse, but it still takes a degree of skill to use it. Touch is so intuitive that it’s able to be used by children, by grandparents, and people whose job it isn’t to be able to use a computer,” he said.

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SANTA BARBARA, CALIF. — Asustek, also known as ASUS — the people who make the Eee PC — plans to ship new notebooks that have touch screens on both the top (where the screen normally goes) and the bottom (where the keyboard normally goes) as early as the first quarter of next year, according to a report.

OK, let’s back up for a second. First of all, I described in my Computerworld.com column back in June what I believe is the future of nearly all mainstream notebooks from both Microsoft’s OEM partners and from Apple. The basic design will be, I believe, one that has screens on both the top and the bottom, just like the next version of the One Laptop Per Child project. If you look at the pictures in that column, you can see the four usage modes:

1. Tablet mode. Snap the laptop open and flat, and the two screens work together as one giant touch screen.

2. Laptop mode. Open the virtual keyboard, which appears full-size on the bottom touch screen, and use like a regular clamshell laptop.

3. Book mode. Open an e-Book and hold it sideways like an open book. One page appears on the left screen and the next page appears on the right. Touch the corner to turn the page.

4. Two-person mode. Open it flat again like Tablet mode, but click a button to make one screen orient itself for one user and the other toward you.

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Well, not quite here, you need to follow this link and pay a visit to our gadgety buddies over at Engadget who have a video waiting just for you. Since Apple banned us and everybody else from shooting videos at their event today, we felt compelled to track down a visual offering and give you a insight into what the new MacBooks have to offer, namely that annoying, lack of buttons multi-touch trackpad (remember when we told you about that?).

The video is simply a summary of the new multi-touch, glass trackpad. It covers a range of finger gestures, as opposed to the hand gesture many Apple aficionado’s would love to give to Mr Jobs to show their disdain for the MacBook’s new trackpad, or glossy displays.

Now this is interesting when it comes to two smartphones with touchscreens, so we thought what the hell lets have a war and the war is “Nokia 5800 Xpress Music Vs Blackberry Storm 9500”.

Now we are not going into the full specs here because all we want to know is, who will win the touchscreen war, displays nowadays is what it all about and how responsive the User Interface (UI), now lets have a brief look into the smartphones then you can decide who the winner is.

Shall we start with the Nokia 5800 Xpress Music, this handset has a 3.2-inch touchscreen with 640×360 pixel resolution, 16 million colors and 16:9 ratio which is pretty impressive, it uses the cool accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate plus has handwriting recognition and the user interface is pretty responsive indeed, so all in all pretty damn good.

Now we have the BlackBerry Storm 9500, now this smartphone has a 3.25-Inch TFT touchscreen, 65K colors/360 x 480 pixels and also has the accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate, this screen however has springs below the display which is the first in any phone; so pretty clever really. The Storm has an on-screen keyboard with SureType and Multi-tap technology, oh and not forgetting the light sensing screen.

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Multitouch technology really does seem to be the next big thing as far as computer interfaces go. The iPhone has it implemented, Microsoft is embedding the tech into Windows 7, and Finnish company MultiTouch recently announced multitouch LCDs.

On Friday, the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, or HIIT (not be confused with high-intensity interval training), launched a new 3D version of its multitouch display called CityWall.

When I say “3D” I mean it’s 3D as far as the graphics on the screen go, but not in the way seen in Minority Report. We’re still a ways off from that.

By using a rear-projection system involving multiple cameras, projectors, and infrared sensors, the technology is able to track as many fingers and hands as can fit on the screen–and uniquely identify them.

This 3D version of CityWall is now in use at the Lasipalatsi medic center of Helsinki, Finland. Currently the screen is being used for an interactive exhibition that focuses on the benefits and nuisances of urban nature. The exhibition will reportedly remain at Lasipalatsi permanently, so if you happen to be weaving your way through Northern Europe at some point, you might want to drop in.

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Apple’s iPhone is making multitouch all the rage on mobile phones but laptop makers are not rushing to add the technology to traditional notebooks.

Multitouch, which lets users control applications through gestures on a screen, may not be the best interface for laptops because of the size and placement of the screen. In addition, there’s little integration between touchscreens and most software.

“You don’t see a lot of touchscreen notebooks because it is not intuitive to reach up and start touching the screen when there is a good keypad,” says Paul Moore, senior director product management at Fujitsu, one of the world’s biggest laptop makers.

Some pundits, such as Computerworld columnist Mike Elgan, argue that computer interfaces of the future will likely blend multitouch with gestures and physics (using accelerometers to detect bumps, shakes or the device’s orientation in space).

Already, many computing devices are using some or all of these techniques. Nintendo’s Wii uses physics — the location and movement of the controller through space — to control actions on screen while multitouch is becoming the interface of choice for smartphones like Google’s Android and Samsung’s Instinct.

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Fujitsu senior product director Paul Moore in an interview published today revealed plans by his company to introduce multi-touch computers while simultaneously downplaying the significance of the technology. Following in the footsteps of an early development in Dell’s Latitude XT, Fujitsu tells Wired it plans to release PCs in mid-2009 that accept multi-finger gestures but plans to limit these to fixed and convertible tablet PCs rather than extend them to all its notebooks. To Moore, the inherently fixed, lidded design of most notebooks makes touchscreens impractical and wastes space, while tablets make the screen the central feature.

“If you put a notebook in a slate mode, you are talking about a platform that is more gesture friendly than the clamshell,” he says. “You don’t see a lot of touchscreen notebooks because it is not intuitive to reach up and start touching the screen when there is a good keypad.”

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