Multitouch goes Corporate. World asks why.

It is now official. Multitouch technology (however you define it), has gone completely corporate. With the Microsoft Digidesk, Microsoft’s Surface stuff, Apple and the iPhone, the smartly-named HTC Touch smartphone, and a whole metric crapton of other touchable electronics, corporate America is telling us that instead of just touching our gadgets, we should touch our gadgets. I’m still waiting for a multitouch-inspired lolcat. Someone help me out here.

Sure, the giant screens Jeff Han makes through NYU’s spinoff, Perspective Pixel, are hotness defined. But are they useful? And in particular, for anyone besides military battlefield operations people? Probably not. And Jeff, although he plays the part of high-technologist promising the “next way of interacting with computers” in his media interviews, probably doesn’t think so, given that the market he is targeting is not your living room. Same goes for the Microsoft Surface. At $10k+ (rumored), this ain’t going to be in anyone’s Warcraft gaming den anytime soon.

From a human-computer interaction perspective, lots of work needs to be done now to establish what modalities large (or small) touch surfaces actually enhance the user experience, provide a “more natural interface”, or even improve productivity.

Can you imagine standing at these big screens thing all day long trying to do real work? Yikes. Besides needing a set of Dansko clogs and a rubber mat to keep my feet happy, how about your arms? I guess it would be an interesting way to get legions of pasty, geeky, wimpy (generalizing here, folks) computer folks like myself to at least get some arm strength. Strap on some weights and we have a real workout here.

Purveyors of these large tables and walls, often use terms like, “visualize”, “analyze”, “collaborate”, when describing the use cases for there products. (I took those words right off the front page of TouchTable.com, just so you know. Which, by the way, was a touch table long before there were cool YouTube videos of touch tables popping up every day.) But almost every demo has either people pan/zooming terrain, or pushing around photos like a digital light table. Yawn.

The actual usage so far is very company- and application-specific, requiring people to actually code things up to do the visualization/analysis/collaboration, rather than using good, off-the-shelf applications. Until we find the right set of interaction models that make these things useful, those applications won’t exist, or they won’t be compelling. The end result, unfortunately, is no digital table hotness in your home.

Oh, and by the way, when Applied Minds did their first big touch table for Northrop Grumman (TouchTable.com again), they did the whole pan/zoom terrain thing before Google Earth — just using Tiger data and GIS maps. Less Googly, but same wow factor. But if you want your terrain really touchable, check out Xenotran’s Xenovision Dynamic Matrix Display (XVDMD, ugh) or Northrop’s TerrainTable (no web site found — check the PDF to the right). TouchTable goodness with pneumatically-actuated “pins” that rise up and give the pliable membrane surface up to 6 inches of height. Combine with a projected image and you have something really touchable.

I still have not seen a terribly convincing use of this technology on a large scale except to get a bunch of people around a single set of data that has already been rendered and visualized in some way. Art installations, military battlefield planning, and cool-ass demos all fall into that category.

Of course, I am putting the whiny horse before the proverbial carriage. It is terribly hard to experiment with this mode of interaction without the devices already existing. Thanks go out to Jeff Han for bringing us the FTIR method for cheap and easy implementation. Now, if he could just give/loan me one, I would be happy to start doing some user-interaction studies with it. But since Jeff won’t, I have a team of students building a small-ish scale table just so we can explore this interaction space a little here at work. I am less interested in the hotness of the table and more in how it can actually be a useful computing peripheral. I’ll let you know how that goes. And Jeff, if you want to send me one, shoot me an email :).

But how about the smaller multi-touch devices, ala iPhone? The smaller scale certainly solves the tired arm problem. But I’ll wait until another post to talk about them…