Here’s an interesting Demo from the guys at Intuilab. It’s a multitouch system, much like the much-touted Microsoft Surface. Only this one sounds like it’s built from scratch and, more importantly for me, is developed in AIR.
That it’s built in AIR is pretty cool – certainly the first inkling that in a few years or so I could actually be working with and developing for multitouch systems, without having to go off and learn a more heavy duty programming language like C or Java or something like that.
Multitouch, as you see in the video above, is pretty much the next step in touch screen interfaces – instead of a single point of contact, they can deal with multiple contacts, and that makes many actions a whole lot easier. What this means for the user is that it opens up a whole new range of possibilities for interfaces and interaction, as well as being cutting edge and damned cool. It’s like you’re in Minority Report (in a good way).
I’m really quite excited about seeing this technology become a little more available – I had thought only Microsoft would be the ones promoting this kind of solution, but it sounds like a few more companies are ready to take them on. And I didn’t know until I started researching a little for this post, but the MacBook Air actually has a multitouch touchpad. It’s not a multitouch touchscreen, but how cool is that?
Wow, this is really exciting. I’d love to develop some games for a multi-touch device. Imagine something like crayon physics or line-rider running on one. Great vid, thanks.
That is really interesting and its cool to hear that it was developed using AIR and the Flash Player 10 API. Lawrie mentioned above in the first post about bringing games to a multi-touch surface and I think this allows from some great creativity and potential for new genres of games. It would be really cool to see a game where two or more users are interacting with the table and interface in cooperation towards a common goal as opposed to working against each other. Though a game of that matter would be interesting as well. I’m very intrigued about future possibilities with respect to multi-touch interactive tables. Thanks for the post!