Ilia Draznin Online

If you haven’t noticed, multi-touch is all the rage these days. From iPhone’s slick inter­face and ges­tures, to all the lap­tops and net­books that are try­ing to get in on the game, not to men­tion Microsoft’s “sub­tle” approach to the issue with their Surface idea. Then there’s also multi-touch for desk­tops, and as always the case with any sort of rush to adopt new tech­nol­ogy, most do it the wrong way — by adding multi-touch to the desk­top mon­i­tor. Sure, it’s easy to slap a capac­i­tive panel on an LCD and call it a day, but that’s not gonna work in the long run. How long do you think you can sit with your arm stretched all the way to the mon­i­tor (if you can even reach it com­fort­ably), not to men­tion your hand obstruct­ing the screen?

That’s why I’m glad to see that at least some peo­ple are still try­ing to think out­side the box. Like take R. Clayton Miller for exam­ple, who came up with the 10/GUI con­cept multi-touch inter­face for a desk­top. The idea in a nut­shell is to sep­a­rate the multi-touch sur­face from the screen and put it on the table in front of the user, like a key­board or a mouse.

Multi-touch con­trol surface

Right away this is smart in two ways: 1) it uses a famil­iar con­trol metaphor — con­trol­ling the UI on screen through con­trollers on the table, instead of directly on the screen; 2) it puts the con­trol sur­face in a com­fort­able loca­tion and with­out obstruct­ing the screen.

Taking the idea even fur­ther Miller comes up with a new “win­dow­ing” sys­tem for the desk­top (which he calls con10uum) which takes advan­tage of the nature of the multi-touch con­trol. Instead of arrang­ing the win­dows on the screen in a ran­dom fash­ion, he puts them all in a line, think the alt+tab taks switcher but instead of small win­dow pre­views you’re deal­ing with the actual pro­gram windows.

Con10uum multi-touch desktop

The idea of con10uum is to take advan­tage of the abil­ity to use all your fin­gers for con­trol. Ordinarily, hav­ing win­dows arranged in such a man­ner would make it cum­ber­some to browse them using a mouse and key­board, but as is shown in the demo, with all your fin­gers at your fin­ger­tips zoom­ing in and out, scrolling and open­ing new win­dows, and access­ing the menus is quick and easy, once you learn the ges­tures. I also like the idea of global and local menu access by using dif­fer­ent sides of the con­trol surface.

It’s still just a con­cept but I hope it’ll be taken fur­ther and turned into a real prod­uct. There are a lot of awe­some ideas here. There is one thing I would change about it though. I think putting the con­trol sur­face in front of the key­board, the way it’s done in the con­cept, isn’t ideal. Personally, I would like to see this replace the mouse. Instead of using a mouse, put the multi-touch sur­face to the right of the key­board — that way you still have access to the key­board as usual (instead of going over the con­trol sur­face). Of course then this becomes a “5/gui” see­ing how you’d be using only one hand on this sur­face. But that’s still 5 times more con­trol point­ers than the mouse.

You can read more about this on Miller’s site.