Apple appears to have been right in betting that people would embrace a big version of the iPod Touch; the increased sense of intimacy with no keyboard or mouse chaperons is palpable. But even larger touchscreens, like the one the Finnish company MultiTouch let us play around with last week, can track each fingertip of a large group of people -- a key distinction that enables a more social set of behaviors, because multiple people can use them at the same time.
These screens maintain their sensitivity to touch even when mounted behind bulletproof glass up to one inch thick, which makes MultiTouch's screens equally suited to the board room, a university lab or public displays. Though they are probably too expensive to put one in your home, unless your home has been featured on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous or Cribs.
The best uses of these massive tablets is in a group setting, and other solutions exist -- most notably Microsoft's Surface technology -- but to date, according to MultiTouch general manager Timo Korpela, none have offered the high resolution and responsiveness to multiple hands necessary for the platform to take off in a big way. As the company rolls out its efforts in the United States in the coming months, on the heels of a multitude of early successes in Europe, we're likely to encounter these massive touch-sensitive displays in more walks of life -- and, possibly, the sidewalks of life, too.
Rather than using an Apple-style capacitive touchscreen, MultiTouch's display system uses a mix of optical and infrared light to recognize objects held against the screen, as well as each fingertip from as many as eight people. This lets you zing documents back and forth in a group for collaboration, edit batches of photos together, and all sorts of other zany stuff.
A university is using it to perform virtual autopsies, with a realistic, 3-D model of a corpse; Siemens ordered one for its corporate lobby this week, and they’re showing up in T-Mobile cellphone stores in Europe, where you can plop a mobile phone onto the screen to interact with an app offering information about that phone model.
Clearly, the potential exists to blanket public spaces with interactive advertising displays, but MultiTouch's Korpela said that so far, the biggest customers have been universities, digital app kiosks, corporations (for their lobbies), medical organizations, museums (to display interactive visual art) and other places people gather for a specific purpose -- potentially boardrooms, newsrooms, video editing firms and so on.
"IPad, iPhone -- even Windows Surface -- are more targeted for a single person to use, maybe with multiple fingers or two hands, but our target segments are locations where multiple people are interacting at the same time," explained Korpela. "And that requires not only a lot from the technology, but it can create also new types of applications where the interaction between the system and the people is a lot different from what we've seen in the past."
Most customers have built their apps in C++ to date, because that lets them optimize their application with more precision, but Silverlight and Flash work too. The latest version is good enough, according to Korpela, that web apps should be possible on these massive screens, encouraging the development of a wider set of functionality.
The key differentiation between MultiTouch and other large touchscreen technologies such as Microsoft Surface is that MultiTouch is able to look through the LCD screen from the other side, using a combination of visible light and infrared, which it emits, whereas Microsoft Surface's projection technology offers lower resolution and responds far more slowly, especially with multiple users, according to Korpela.
For those familiar with the way a cathode-ray-tube display works, the setup of these MultiTouch units is an inversion of that familiar design: Instead of electron guns, a little camera sits a couple of feet behind each screen to capture everything that happens within the inch (or less -- just about every attribute can be tweaked per application) of the other side of the screen, 120 times per second.
That's enough data to capture with precision not only every fingertip on your hands and your palms, but those of an entire group, so you can collaborate on a mural, examine satellite photos, and so on, as a group.
Usually, technology allows us to collaborate remotely; this allows us to collaborate digitally, but in person.
Without being told how to use it, we were able to fling objects around on a four-screen MultiTouch unit, resizing and spinning windows with either the fingers in one hand or by moving two hands further apart, and Korpela was right -- we perceived the responsiveness as real-time, with no distinguishable latency.
At the Detroit Auto Show, eight people used one of these systems at the same time in a demonstration -- that's 80 fingertips and 16 palms to keep track of. In France, they're already installed in photo-editing kiosks, where people can insert an SD card, touch up their digital photos with their hands, and print them. In Finland, one appeared on a public street for people to interact with, and in Venice, visitors to an art gallery used one to improve art that was designed with audience interaction in mind.
Korpela says even Microsoft employees are big fans.
"At CES in January, we announced full support for Windows Surface, so we can run Windows Surface applications on top of our platform," recalled Korpela. "The funny thing is that over 30 people from Microsoft actually came to meet us, since their applications were faster on our platform than on their own."
There is one drawback to this design: Because you touch these screens, you are, by necessity, standing beside one, and therefore MultiTouch could not use a single large screen. Instead, it lashes four to fourteen of them together, so there are seams. The 14-screen limit is due to the accompanying Linux PC only having room for seven dual-screen graphics cards. But as a result, all of the images look really crisp up close -- as well they should.
In addition to recognizing touch, the MultiTouch can see 2-D tags and actual objects -- a result of its lineage as an object-recognition system, which is what its creators originally thought it would be. That means it can interact with objects, while you interact with it, offering all sorts of possibilities, from virtual multiuser music instruments to collaborative 3-D editing software.
This doesn't come cheap. A single-unit display runs $17,500, although costs go down as an order scales up, because you only need one processor box to power up to 14 screens. That price also includes a software development kit with which you can build your own apps, because MultiTouch doesn't make apps -- just the platform. And don't expect the company to open-source that SDK in order to sell more hardware, either, because to do so would be to give away the company's core technology, which Korpela claims no other company currently duplicates.
See Also:
- D&D + Microsoft Surface = Unheard-of Levels of Radness
- First Look: Microsoft Milan Surface Computer -- A Table That Knows What It's On
- Microsoft Surface Gets Doctors' Notice
- Thin Film Turns Any Surface Into a Touchscreen
- Microsoft Shows Off Surface in Sheraton Hotels
- Pinch and Spread: The Battle Over Multitouch Tech Is On
