I Really Don’t Know

More Touch UI Videos

I wrote last week about the increasing visibility of multi-touch UIs, most recently with Apple’s iPhone. This week I’ve found some more to share…

Ksan Lab have a nice demo of Virtual Painter up on YouTube giving a nice view of the natural style of interaction allowed by these devices. The gestures used here are different to those seen in some of the other demos. It (or the demonstrator) seems to favor single-finger use.

Here’s another great demo that combines touch with physical tokens to give a great Conservation Lab demo, it seems to be pitching at a Point of Information styles application.

Then, of course, there’s TouchTable which is much larger than a lot of what we’ve seen and is designed around a shared experience – I can imagine this having huge potential in so many applications from meetings (war rooms) and team gaming either co-operative or not.

But if it’s large that you want then iBar should be up your street. It’s not too clever, having a rather limited display repertoire, but still the size is impressive.

Lemur from JazzMutant is designed specifically as a medi controller, so the dispaly is geared to ui artefacts rather than a desktop, but the different types of interactions are impressive. That’s being shown off here in one mode and here as a sequencer.

Natural Interaction are also showcasing stuff like an interactive table called tabulaTouch, showing tabulaMaps. They stick to a lot fo the more common UI gestures that we’ve been seeing (I must find some names for them). They also have a Minority Report style UI.

Then there’s the Diamond Touch work that allows simultaneous multi-user touch input and looks very slick again – this time working with a fairly standard OS interface. There’s a nice touch when the team “accidentally” spill the coke on the screen. Diamond Touch comes out of MERL, so stands a good chance of hitting the shelves.

But of course there’d be no show without Punch, and I finally found some touch UI work from Microsoft, coming on VIsta Tablets. I could have cried watching Hilton Locke demoing this; the cursor doesn’t stick with your finger! Even doing the demo is broken. Apparently people new to touch input will find it really intuitive ’cause “pretty much everyone uses a two button mouse”. That’s right, they’ve put a finger controlled mouse on screen! That sucks in so many ways I just can’t start.

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