10 finger frenzy

I am slowly getting a better picture of what I want to do with my master thesis or, actually, what direction I want to take my expertise. When talking with people at the excellent UIST conference last week I really got the feeling that every-day multitouch is not really in focus of researchers. A lot of very cool "session work" on tabletops and wall screens, but not much work on how our personal computer can benefit from it. As it goes with researching somewhere some researcher wants to shoot me right now.

But I got a very interesting question at UIST: where can I find your blog, it sounds really interesting. Oops, forgot that. So from now on, for sake of fun and prior-work claims, more about what I am working on.

The idea is to incorporate the benefits and overcome the hurdles of using multitouch. For the laymen: multitouch means that you can use more than one cursor as input on your computer. In practice this means using your fingers. But be aware of marketing; a lot of "multitouch" all-in-one's you can buy nowadays are actually dualtouch, they can only detect 2 contact points at the same time.

Multitouch has a lot of hurdles to overcome, mainly because I am looking to replace the omnipresent default keyboard and mouse with it. Things like feedback while typing, occlusion from your hands and the fact your fingers are really fat come up while first thinking about it. The benefits are mainly in the flexible nature of multitouch solutions and the higher input shared between cursor and text input.

Most work done is done on a 'darling' of this generation: direct touch. Our current setup is indirect, we type and move our mouse somewhere in the periphery of where we are looking; we manipulate external objects which though cable or wireless transmission lets the computer update the state of your screen. Suddenly words appear where we are looking or windows move. Direct touch is the opposite where we directly manipulate what we want to interact with. You see this on our current smart-phones, tablets and tabletop/wall-screen setups. Direct touch solves a lot of confusing elements of finding your cursor, actually: you do not have to find out the state of your computer before using it.

But, and this is a big but, indirect manipulation has one golden advantage: it follows the natural resting positions of our body. That is why keyboards and mice are still alive; try to use your tablet all day, try to tap on your screen all day. It gets annoying quite fast. That is why I call the fancy new stuff "session work". You have a meeting, arrange stuff on the fancy Perceptive Pixel wall screen, sort your pictures on the ubiquitous multitouch tabletop project, walk through election results, etc. When the session is over, you continue with your "normal" work.

So... indirect multitouch. Most people know 10/Gui, which is already a very cool starting point. It recognises that mouse input could really benefit by upgrading your single cursor to 10 controllable ones. But 10/Gui acknowledges the superiority of the keyboard. Not a bad stance, but where is the fun in that? What can we do to make a big slate of multitouch tabletop screen real useful in daily use cases?

First up next: "I am never giving up my keyboard."