A Revolution at Our Fingertips
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Many of you have seen or heard about Apple's iPhone and its new touch screen technology capable of recognizing more than one touch at the same time. Apple isn't the only one with a cool new touch-related technology. Some of these interactive technologies might even become as common as the mouse in your office.
When Steve Jobs showed off the iPhone at Macworld, he changed the way we think about touch screens. "Are we going to use a stylus? No, we're not. We're going to use the best pointing device in the world...our fingers." Note the plural there. It quickly became clear that he meant more than one finger when he viewed a photo on the iPhone's touch screen. He resized the photo by pinching two fingers together on the screen to make it smaller and drawing them further apart to make it larger.
Believe it or not, this could be just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the future of touch screens. Ask Jeff Han. The founder of Perceptive Pixel gave a presentation about a year ago on the first day of TED 2006, the annual technology, entertainment and design conference in Monterey, California. Using a cobalt blue 36-inch display and his two hands, Han conjured the future of computing for the crowd watching the giant screen at his back, on which his manipulations were projected.
He started with playful, colorful wavy lines, progressing to a lava lamp whose blobs changed color and shape based on how hard he pressed the screen. Next, he moved on to some vacation photos, shifting them around on the monitor just as if they were actual pictures sitting on a table. As Steve Jobs did nearly a year later, he was able to enlarge and shrink each photo using just two fingers. But he was just getting warmed up.
He pulled up a satellite program. Now it was time for some serious work -- or serious fun, depending on your perspective. He brought up a mountainous landscape with just one finger, and then he moved through it, changing his perspective and apparent distance from the mountains just by running his fingers over the touch screen. He could zoom in from a continental view down to traveling through one particular box canyon. He could even tilt his field of view, like a plane doing a barrel roll. The audience applauded.
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