Multi-touch Screens: The Latest Input Technology

Just when you thought you knew everything you needed to know about input technologies Apple comes out with something new: multi-touch screens. And they're not the only ones working on multi-touch. Apple was simply the first to make multi-touch a compelling feature in a handheld computer they call the iPhone.

The multi-finger-touch-sensitive screens react to the flicks, pinches, and pushes of your finger tips. Multi-point commands are easy to do, simple to learn and are as intuitive as using a single-point pointing device such as a mouse or digital pen.

The problem is, Apple came out with the iPhone (and a brilliant implementation of multi-touch) before the rest of the industry was ready to respond! How typical of Apple to trump the market. And there are two other problems with the iPhone: cost and availability. Currently, you have to use AT&T as your phone service and then pay 500-600 dollars for the device. So while multi-touch is really cool, very few people can afford it yet. And, the iPhone is totally impractical to teach in the classroom -- we can't give each student a new iPhone/handheld computer regardless of how brilliant it is.

Not to worry. Ubiquitous multi-touch screens are coming soon. And it's something we should keep our eye on. Perhaps we will be buying monitors that handle multi-touch or laptops that allow multi-touch fingertip control for students to try.

Will multi-touch replace a digital pen or mouse? In some ways I hope so. Have you ever lost your pen? It would be nice to use your fingertips in an emergency, wouldn't it? Also, using more than one touch-point, more than one finger on the screen at a time, gives the technology some added features that are just plain exciting. Here are a couple of links to YouTube videos on multi-touch that you might find interesting. Remember, the equal sign at the end of these web addresses is required.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulwA3n8AYM0&eurl=

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcKqyn-gUbY&mode=related&search=

I don't know where I first heard the term "input technologies." I do believe it was in Virginia. Nevertheless, I'm so glad that back in 2002, business education began talking about "input technologies" as a broad category that encompasses all of these new DigiTools. Who knew that we would move so far beyond just keyboarding and the mouse in such a short period of time? NBEA’s far-sighted National IT Standards admonished students way back then to, use a variety of input technologies and develop proper input techniques (e.g., keyboarding, scanning, speech recognition, handwriting recognition, and the use of a touch screen or mouse). Now that’s vision.
(National Standards for Business Education, www.nbea.org, ISBN 0-933964-56-0)