The Future of Multi-Touch
Create Digital Music recently posted a nice article and interview with JazzMutant’s CEO Guillaume Largillier. If you don’t know JazzMutant and its Lemur interface, well go in the Interaction Workshop and have a look the device. It is the first multi-touch hardware interface that was offered commercially to this world.
It is always interesting to discover the history, process and ideas behind a product or service. It was nice to discover their early Lemur prototype back from 2003. The interview presents nothing really new or ground-breaking about the future of multi-touch. But throughout the article/interview, you realize that multi-touch is so much about all the hype and crap right now (rotating videos or ten-finger painting), it’s difficult to find and appreciate well-thought and truly meaningful multi-touch offerings. I personally have seen only a few (2-3) on the Microsoft’s Surface and the iPhone. Out of gazillions apps and developers out there, that is a pretty low success rate I would say. It’s not the norm but more the exception. Sure you can say that the “pinch to zoom” gesture is great and useful. But with only 2 touches, it kind of the low-end of multi-touch.
So it goes back to the whole ecology of multi-touch that Mr. Largillier talks about: getting all the pieces together is totally not trivial. The design approach (and understanding) has to match the hardware and software integration. And like always, details, details, details. The details matter very much: latency, robustness, accuracy and the likes.
Anyways, go and read the article:
The Future of Multi-Touch: Behind the Scenes with Stantum, JazzMutant Co-Founder
