More and more articles are questioning the value of multi-touch. You’d think with the success of the multi-touch-enabled iPhone and the commitments Microsoft is making to touch interfaces with Surface and Windows 7, you’d imagine that there’d be more favorable talk going around. There isn’t.
Mary Jo Foley, for instance, has questioned the value of multi-touch in notebooks. And ZDNet’s Zack Whittaker has taken a broader swipe at touch questioning its value across the board, suggesting that it’s the “most evil technology in modern computing.”
I’m an advocate of looking at alternative ways to interact with computers and as such I’m more of a fan of multi-touch than not, however, I can appreciate their concerns. Just because you have a hammer, doesn’t mean everything is a nail. The same can be going on here with touch and multi-touch.
However, I think there’s more going on here. Part of the challenge is that people haven’t really experienced PC-based multi-touch interfaces yet so they don’t yet see the value. I think time will tell whether the multi-touch experiment is a success, but you see we have to try to know. I’m glad that Microsoft and the OEMs are taking the step. It’s not that expensive to implement the techology and to give it a try.
I also think people need to step back and think about all of the touch interfaces that have already made it into the market–though not on our desktops and notebooks. Check out the touch displays at restaurants. And what about the ATMs you visit? All touch. Yeah, not multi-touch, but touch nonetheless.
You can see why touch displays have their place: The buttons (and on-screen controls) are virtual. This gives great flexibility to the designers, can add ruggedness and reliability (fewer mechanical parts to fail), and creates simplicity.
Now yes, these are touch and not multi-touch systems, but when you think about it, why not allow multi-touch? To me, it opens up the possibility of multiple simultaneous users, “real” virtual keyboards and the like (PC keyboards, musical instruments, etc).
I imagine we could keep all of this in a lab for a dozen years or so to see if all of this makes sense, but I’m quite the advocate of letting people give it a go. That’s why I’m a fan of getting multi-touch to market. I fully think we’re going to find that there’s more to multi-touch than pinch gestures. We’ll have to see.
I do have one concern in all of this. I wonder what touch technologies are going to make sense with the forthcoming thin and flexible displays. Will capacitive or resistive technologies bend with the changes in display technology? Again, we’ll have to see. I hope that whatever happens that we don’t wind up building touch software to one set of hardware only to find out that it’s not compatible with the innovation needs of computers just a couple years down the road. This could be a major stumbling block to the widespread adoption of touch and multi-touch in the years to come.
I think the time has come to make a distinction between two primary use cases for the PC. On the one hand, you have viewing – finding something that already exists (whether it’s in a folder or on the web) and viewing it. Searching through massive numbers of documents with multi-touch and a graphical interface such as the one our local library uses (http://www.acornweb.org/) would be almost fun.
On the other hand, document or text creation has a minor place, at best, for multi-touch. Here, the need to translate thoughts to virtual paper rather than to action calls for technologies such as handwriting or speech recognition (at least until we get that brain interface perfected).
Unfortunately, I think the biggest obstacle to any of the new technologies is user inertia. Like the tablet PC, multi-touch may fail to make inroads because people are used to doing things the way they always have.