Concerned Citizens

Okay, I’m going to try to start a new trend in blogging by picking a topic a day and blogging in that area. Today I call Tech Tuesdays and I take a look at multi-touch interfaces. If you’re not familiar, multi-touch is what you’ve been using a lot lately if you have one of the more popular smart phones like an iPhone. The interface basically allows you to interact using your fingers and various gestures. What’s interesting is that it opens up an entire area of user experience many have never really realized, interfaces that are more natural to our daily lives.

Today a co-worker showed me one of the best implementations of multi-touch I’ve seen in a while. It leverages a surface style device where the image is projected onto the back surface of a translucent screen sitting like a table. From there a set of infrared cameras look for instances of an object touching the surface. The image shows up as a black representation on a white background that is processed by the cameras and registers the touch and tracking of the touch. It’s leveraged in the Microsoft Surface you find in many AT&T stores and in Las Vegas.

In many cases people are just porting their computer applications complete with interface to the device, yielding a less than natural interaction. Mouse actions don’t really translate well to a touch type interface. However, in this instance the thing that’s really cool is how the developer used a real world experience as a DJ and developed an incredible multi-touch digital DJ turntable, complete with new features and functions that lend themselves well to the touch or gesture-based interface.

Multi Touch Light Table: GERGWERK from GERG WERK on Vimeo.

You see the key things this developer did that many touch or gesture-based developers fail to do is to rethink the interface based on the environment. Instead of taking the current physical implementation directly to the touch interface, he took certain gesture-based interactions such as spinning the table to the device but used different gesture-based interactions for things like volume and equalizer control.

I can’t wait to see these devices showing up in clubs and DJ events. It will truly start to revolutionize the experience and hopefully provide new creativity by the DJs, a group I have always had high regard for. Just think, soon you may walk into a club and see a DJ “spinning” on a digital surface. Above him on the wall will be the image of that surface projected so all can not only hear the creativity of the artist but see it as well.

This is where the new interfaces will surface (pardon the pun) and create rich interaction experiences with our lives. As we develop new technologies for touch, sound recognition and brain wave interaction the devices will start to open more powerful type applications. However, this will happen only if developers start to see new ways to interact with devices.

Yes, we are on our way to Minority Report devices and interactions but that will only happen when we truly think outside the box.