At the SID Mobile Displays Conference* in San Diego I gave a presentation on how multi-touch technology can help close the gap between smart phones and mobile computers. I told my audience – planners, designers and engineers of small displays for electronics products – that the real challenge is to develop user interfaces for mobile computers that are:

• worker- and user-friendly;
• productive and entertaining;
• efficient and intuitive;
• playable and playful; and
• handy and appealing.

Multi-touch opens up a wide field of possibilities if it leverages the user’s capacity to split tasks between the two hands. To enable this, touch-panels must allow true unlimited multi-touch, with accurate coordinates of each contact point; be able to detect fingers and styli; and offer uncompromised performance – a resolution as high as 0.2 millimeters and a time response as fast as 10 milliseconds.

Two-handed manipulation greatly improves overall efficiency and playfulness, and combining finger and stylus input makes for a richer user experience – even on a small display. In my presentation, I demonstrated this with Stantum’s existing multi-touch technology – showing the thumb of the hand with the device activating menus and options, while the dominant hand performed the main operations with stylus or fingertips.

Beyond the Pinch Gesture - Introducing the next generation of Multi- Touch Interfaces for mobile applications.

This video combines P-Matrix™ Multi-touch technology with VisionObject MyScript™ OCR algorithm to deliver best-in-class handwriting recognition.