Applications for touch, multi-touch, and gesture interaction: What's Marching to Market?

Every week or so, I hear about a new multi-touch enabled laptop.Today, I came across a review on Gizmodo about the Lenovo ThinkPad T400, which is a 14.1 capacitive touchscreen laptop that can handle four touches at once:

Lenovo ThinkPad T400s with Multitouch Review: Finger Flicking Fun


The Multitouch ThinkPad in Action

Lenovo ThinkPad T400s with Multitouch from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

SCREENSHOT
 
"The screen is pure beauty. Like a capacitive touchscreen phone, light taps on the display are responsive and you don't have to think about positioning your finger in a certain way to open apps or rearrange windows." - Joanna Stern, Gizmodo, 9/15/09


OTHER EXAMPLES
 
THE FUJITSU LIFEBOOK T5010

Add the Fujitsu LifeBook t5010 to the Windows 7 Multitouch Laptop List
Gizmodo, Joanna Stern, 9/15/09



DELL LATITUDE XT2
 

 












TOUCH DEMO- HP TOUCHSMART TX2 & WINDOWS 7


AIR HOCKEY FOR WINDOWS 7: IDENTITY MINE


FINGERTAPPS





Want to create something multi-touch?

It looks like there will be a growing need for Windows 7 application developers.  Here's some code examples using Windows Presentation Foundation and the Windows 7 Multitouch API

Windows 7 Multitouch Application Development, Part I (The Code Project: Kunal Chowdhury)


Other Developer Resources

Touchlib Multi-touch Development Kit  (NUI GROUP)

MSDN Windows Touch: Developer Resources

nTrig's Multi-Touch Download for Windows 7

NUITech's Snowflake Suite for NextWindow

TouchKit Multi-touch Development Kit


GestureWorks Flash Multitouch SDK

3M Multi-touch Developer Kit


RELATED
Touch-less Interaction from lm3labs

Create the future you want. with ubiq'window from Nicolas Loeillot on Vimeo.

More about gesture interaction and multi-touch can be found on this blog- do a search!

Exploring high quality, low-cost, and opensource eyegaze, and face tracking technologies:

Update:  More information about this topic is posted on the TechPsych blog.

I'm working with a few students who have multiple special needs who are in need of assistive communication technologies that are not expensive. Although my first idea was to look at eye gaze technology, the possibility of face tracking is also appealing. Take a look at the following video from SeeingMachines, a commercial company:



I have a couple of webcams, and I don't mind a trip to RadioShack. I can program a bit, too, but I have very limited time. I welcome any advice you might have.

Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting Collaborative Information Visualization. A little dry, but worth watching.

I'd like to see how these concepts play out on a multi-touch, multi-user table system!

In this video, Jeffrey Heer, from the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, presents his work in the field of interactive information visualization, and focuses on visualization techniques,visualization tools, and collaborative visualization.

The video is nearly one hour long, but worth it if you are a techie who is interested in information visualization.



Another option - scan through the following presentation:
Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting Social Data Analysis

CIDR 2009: Jeff Heer Keynote

View more documents from infoblog.

Infoblog

Ru Zarin's Interactive Multi-touch Applications for the Cognitively Disabled: Social stories, talking symbols, a piano, and more!

 

Trollskogen Final Demo from Ru Zarin on Vimeo.

The above video is a demonstration of Ru Zarin's masters degree project at Umea Universitet.

This project examined ways to use multi-touch technologies to support communication and learning among children with Down syndrome, autism, and related diagnoses within the age group of 5-8. I especially liked the animated social story application.

"Trollskogen is a communicative framework designed to enhance communication among people with cognitive disabilities. The forest is split up into interactive modules that provide a fun and engaging learning environment while helping improve on certain aspects of speech, reading/writing and symbol based languages. This framework has been deployed on a custom multi-touch table prototype built at the Interactive institute Umeå, enabling the children to interact with their fingers in a more natural, intuitive way rather than a traditional keyboard/mouse setup."

RELATED READING
RELATED VIDEOS OF THE PROJECT DEVELOPMENT

Ru collaborated with the illustrator Linda Arvidsson for the characters and objects found in the troll forest theme.  

I especially liked the Troll Forest Cabin, which is shown in the social stories section of the video.

Cross-posted on the TechPsych blog.

CONCAVESCREAM: Soundtrack for a book interactive music and visuals,nice and relaxing on a touch screen!

I found a link to an interesting audio-based interactive website today. The Concave Scream "Soundtrack for a Book" is a promotional website for the band's new album of the same name. I never heard of this band before, but I'm impressed with the touch screen interactivity that the website provides!

It was awarded the FWA (Favorite Website Award) earlier this year.

 

Stantum's Mobile Phone Multi-touch Interface: Demonstration of Precise Interactions on a Resistive Touch Screen

For more information, read Paul Miller's article (Engadget), Stantum's mind-blowing multitouch interface on video!



Paul Miller says:

"The PMatrix multitouch firmware allows for unlimited inputs, detection of any contacting object (a finger, a stylus or even a paintbrush) and pressure sensitivity. We played with the demo unit for a bit and were frankly blown away, it's far and away the best touch experience we've ever seen or felt, and the multitouch functionality is just gravy on top. Stantum is targeting resistive touchscreens because they're still considerably cheaper to build than capacitive ones, and from our perspective there seems to be zero tradeoff -- for sensitivity and accuracy this destroys everything else we've seen on the market, capacitive or not."

How it works:  Tech Specs from Stantum:

PMatrix: The unparalleled Multi-Touch IP core and detection firmware (pdf)


"PMatrix™ is the most powerful software engine for Multi-Touch technology. It runs as a chip firmware or software on controllers orany embedded processing devices. PMatrix scans and delivers an exact representation of what’s happening on the touch-panel. The Multi-Touch driver dynamically updates the cursor list, enabling any application to control the Graphical User Interface objects."

Stantum's rational behind the company's choice of using resistive rather than capacitive touch technology:

Why resistive? :
In comparison to capacitive sensing, resistive technology brings :

• Versatility : it detects fingers, gloves, stylus and any contact object
• A lower solution cost
• Lower power consumption
• Faster scanning rate
• Lower overall latency
• Precision is linear (same in the center and at the borders)
• Performance is not affected by the size of the touch-panel or the number of touches
• Transparency and soft touch enabling user experience equivalent to the best capacitive touch-panels

I'll update this post when I have more information!


RELATED

For in-depth, detailed information about resisitive multi-touch technology,  read the following posts via Touch User Interface:

How the Stantum's Resistive Multi-Touch Screen Works 
Pressure Sensitive Multi-touch Surfaces