Enhancing Productivity through Multi-Touch

By Jin Kim

Jin Kim is the founder and president of DisplayBlog, focused on providing up-to-date news and analysis on the display market, products and technology.

Multi-touch: Apple kick-started it with the iPhone, and Windows 7 is carrying the torch forward to nearly 90% of all PCs. You can bet there will be thousands upon thousands of software applications that will make use of Windows 7's multi-touch capabilities.

Windows 7, as well as all of the prior versions of Windows, is designed from the ground up to work in sync with a keyboard and a mouse. Interestingly, it was again Apple who trail blazed the keyboard/mouse mode of interacting with the computer when it commercialized Xerox PARC's experimental graphical user interface (GUI) as the Macintosh. OS X, Windows 7 and even Linux feature menu systems, icons, palettes, and dialog boxes in their GUIs that are optimized to work with a mouse pointer. That's how I'm writing this commentary, with a keyboard and a mouse, which is used by nearly everyone who interacts with a computer today. Will adding multi-touch capabilities to a keyboard/mouse-dominant computer world be effective?

Multi-touch brings users a step closer to the computer and enables them to interact directly with the screen using one or more fingers. The experience is quite liberating and allows a freedom of motion that cannot be experienced with a mouse; multi-touch gestures such as pinching or dragging a picture, though rudimentary, are quite exciting. System providers, software developers and multi-touch hardware manufacturers will need to collaborate and rethink the entire multi-touch experience and purposefully design a computer with which we interact with our fingers and not with a mouse or even a keyboard. This collaboration must occur if multi-touch is to grow beyond a neat feature to a wholesale change in the way we compute.

I believe the next great media-consumption device will greet us in the form of a tablet. The multi-touch tablet will be primarily used to read books, magazines and newspapers; listen to music; watch videos; draw; and manipulate and organize media. The tablet experience has the potential to truly change the way we interact with our computers. It will solidify multi-touch as a mandatory technology for computers, just as the keyboard and mouse are today.

Looking forward, virtually unlimited opportunities exist to significantly enhance productivity through multi-touch technology in the automotive, aerospace, defense, industrial, medical, and other industries. New companies will surface offering unique products and services focused on improving the multi-touch experience, and that will lead to wealth creation beyond our imagination.