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HP’s giant Multi-touch wall

More from the multi-touch bandwagon, although I should point out this isn’t a product from Hewlett Packard, but an interactive marketing tool for the D5 conference, created by San Francisco agency Obscura Digital (on behalf of ad agency Goodby Silverstein Partners).

The surface lets you browse through 5 years of D conference videos, photos, articles and quotes, in addition to a live music sequencer and real-time stock quotes.

I mentioned previously that I’d only post new developments in the area of multi-touch. Microsoft got a post for getting something ready as a packaged product. I am posting this project because of its scale, 16 x 8 feet, and that the whole thing was apparently created in just 4 weeks, hardware and software.

Darren David, created the user interface for this project. This blog post explains:

“The biggest challenge on the WPF side was developing a multi-touch input framework from scratch. All of the familiar Mouse events were useless to me; I had to extract point data from a UDP stream coming across the network from the machine which was translating touch in to x,y coordinates. I’m actually very pleased with the solution, it proved to be very performant and easy to work with. At the end of the day, I was surprised at how much could actually be accomplished in this model, and it only served to get me more excited about multi-touch surface computing. Perhaps this warrants some future posts on working with multi-touch, as it certainly seems to be the flavor of the month right now”.

For 4 weeks its a great achievement. There are a few UI tweaks needed (if you watch the videos), see as objects flying off randomly upon touch, but understandable given the deadline. Watch video 1, video 2.

So what next ?
More and more developers are now creating multi-touch screens, without really asking WHY. Now that the technology is open and there are communities available to help, this takes away the initial learning curve. A criticism of all these kinds of projects for me is that the model of interaction doesn’t change. Han, iPhone, Surface and this project all do the two finger drag to stretch a photo, rotate it etc. Who needs to throw a photo around a screen? Unless the interface itself is a toy and a showcase, rather than concentrating on meaningful interaction or function.

Like all new technology, we are just getting to grips with it. It will be interesting to see where it goes next, or if it dies from lack of new creative ideas.

Comments

• Joe Cutting says:
  (June 14th 2007)
  

  Hmm, I can see Multitouch having two main uses:
  For installations and “casual” applications the big advantage will be for multi-user applications - at the moment all touch sensitive applications can only be used by one person at once. Look out for lots of “board game” type applications.
  I think the more complex interactions that you can do with multi touch like the two finger drag will only be used by more advanced users who’ve been trained on the application or use it a lot - a bit like keyboard shortcuts. Look out for people building installations which use these interactions and then finding that casual users ignore them and just touch and drag with one finger.
  The next big advance we need is to get away from projected systems. Compared to LCD screens projectors have low resolution, low contrast and are a pig to install and run.

• Darren David says:
  (June 14th 2007)
  

  Hi Chris-

  The “throwing” of images was entirely intentional, as this was most definitely an art installation and not a serious tool. It was was a blast to be able to pull up a photo/video on one side of the screen, then throw it over to someone on the other side so they could look at it. I think that the scale of these devices is going to warrant different methods of interaction — throwing on a iPhone would be silly, but “passing the salt” from one end of the table to the other makes sense with 16 feet of width. We’ll just have to wait and see what v2 forces us to do. :)

  Darren

• Trevor Green says:
  (June 14th 2007)
  

  What we need is a hardware vendor for the physical interface, compatibility with single input touch and MS Vista and then a driver for the hardware that works with a MS API that triggers programable Microsoft Events from Multitouch input. In conjuntion with WPF. The details of the ui can be worked out through various developers and windows updates. I want the hardware now, even if it is just for single touch initially. I would buy surface today if it was available and compatible with regular windows and there was a commitment to build apps ontop of Vista and not some specific version. For that matter, surface should just be a monitor technology that you can stick you own box into, not an integrated computer and monitor, which will slow the adoption of the product.

• Andy Polaine says:
  (July 5th 2007)
  

  Only just saw this Chris, but I quite agree. However, like all interactivity, it needs playing with to discover its properties and language, so I’m glad to see it out there. I think the projected systems are problematic as Joe says, but they’re also relatively low cost which is an enormous advantage with their take-up along with the kind of work the NUI Group are doing.

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