Changing Computing Experience with Multi-touch Technology

The future of computing experience seems to be using less monitor / keyboard / mouse and more like user's direct physical interactions and voice commands for data entry or office type editing tasks. The recent innovations on multi-touch technology used in iPhone, Microsoft Surface, etc., seems to heading towards this future.

In 2007, Microsoft introduced Microsoft Surface a multi-touch table computer. Few months ago, introduced Microsoft TouchWall, an intelligent whiteboard is a wall-based multi-touch interface that uses touchscreen hardware and special software built on a standard version of Vista called Plex.

The functionality of Touchwall is very much similar to Microsoft Surface but much cheaper to produce. (Surface retails at around $10,000, while Touchwall will cost around hundreds of dollars).

Microsoft Office Labs GM Chris Pratley and Director of Envisioning Ian Sands said that the two products Microsoft Surface and Microsoft TouchWall are completely different. Surface is a multi-touch and vision system that uses cameras to sense what is on the table, where it is and what it is doing. Whereas, TouchWall consists of three infrared lasers that scan a surface. A camera notes when something breaks through the laser line and feeds that information back to the Plex software. Watch Bill Gates demonstrating TouchWall at Microsoft CEO Summit 2008 here.

After the release of Microsoft TouchWall, now Microsoft Office Labs is releasing a multitouch software called Touchless, a multi-touch Open Source Software Developer Kit that uses a regular Web camera and everyday objects as input.

Like Microsoft Surface and Touchwall, the Touchless software makes it possible to create applications that turn hand gestures and physical objects into an input device like a mouse. It enables touch without touching by using a webcam to track color based markers.

The software developer kit is available now under an open-source Microsoft Public License. Touchless includes two parts:

1. Touchless Demo is an open source application that anyone with a webcam can use to experience multi-touch, no geekiness required.
2. Touchless SDK is an open source SDK that enables developers to create multi-touch based applications using a webcam for input, geekiness recommended.

Note: Touchless project is an Office Labs community project, which means a Microsoft employee worked on this in their spare time. It is also an open source project, which means that anyone can view, use, and contribute to the code.

Its really interesting to see new revolutionary innovations coming from Microsoft. Now, we need to see how this multi-touch technology is going to affect our computing experience.