by Guillaume Largillier, Stantum’s Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer

Since our previous issue of Touch Point, Stantum presented at DisplaySearch's Emerging Display Technologies Conference in San Jose, Calif., where we proposed that achieving the “killer app” is key to expansion in the multi-touch market. While recognizing that multi-touch is a hot-button technology and demand for it is growing, finding the killer app that will make it really take off has yet to be achieved.

In the presentation, we laid out guidelines the industry must follow in order to progress beyond the early stage of multi-touch product introductions, especially in the PC space. We demonstrated how cool it might be to draw with multiple fingers or to manipulate multiple videos on one screen, but then we asked if those applications are really useful?  

A good example of a killer app, we said, might be a note application that supports handwriting recognition, where you can draw or highlight directly on the text, an interactive menu, or a sub-menu activated on the side of the display. In this slide we showed a menu appearing below the tip of a stylus.

The presentation went on to cite how the buzz around multi-touch is creating much momentum in the software development community and that we expect innovative software engineers and marketers will design applications that change how users interact with machines in ways that most people today find hard to imagine. It's like that with any innovative new technology. When the Internet was first launched, who expected something like Twitter would come along and change the way we interact with our social networks? And this is how it will be with multi-touch when the killer app appears.

We stressed, however, that not all multi-touch technologies are equal, adding that the user experience from one technology to the other can be very different. More importantly, not all implementations within one multi-touch technology subcategory – e.g., capacitive or resistive – are equal. A product designer can't put a specific technology in a box and make some generalization, such as resistive multi-touch has poor optical performance, or capacitive multi-touch can only do two touches. It is critical to dive into the details of a particular solution's implementation, and the quality of the implementation is crucial, no matter what technology is used.

We gave Stantum's patented multi-touch technology as an example, emphasizing that it has already been implemented in solutions with superior optical performance, extremely low activation force, and – most significantly – best-in-class responsiveness, one of the most critical aspects of usability and the one most likely to enable the killer app that finally emerges.

To promote this emergence, we explained to our audience of product planners, designers, and third-party integrators how Stantum's multi-touch technology works with fingers, fingernails and (as illustrated above) styli; provides fast response, with precision, consistency and low jitter; consumes little power; is supported by any operating system; and lends itself to simple, flexible manufacturing.

We concluded the presentation by expounding on how the consumer electronics, music, industrial, scientific, automotive, medical, and retail markets could all leverage Stantum multi-touch technology, with killer apps in smartphones, gaming consoles, PCs, mobile Internet devices, portable multimedia players, navigation devices, point-of-sales equipment, and many other types of products.

For his own perspective on multi-touch – past, present and future – check out the commentary by DisplayBlog's Jin Kim on our TAKE THE FLOOR page.