Friday, April 4, 2008

Multi-touch interface design

What do you guys think of this idea by Jeff Han? What applications can you imagine for this kind of interface for Multi-user Virtual Environments? Other applications?

1 comment:

Nicolas Dedual said...

I don't know how exactly this multi-touch can benefit second life, as movement and interaction in second life is pretty limited.

However, this kind of technology could be used to enhance user interaction with data in any sort of environment, not just with virtual worlds. Take, for example, MERL's DiamondTouch technology, which is a multi-touch interface similar in usage to Microsoft's Surface computing platform or Apple's iPhone technology (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6420668728353654549&q=merl+multi+touch&total=11&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=9)

They give two good demos for how this technology can be used: video game interaction (by directing multiple characters in World of Warcraft) and by interacting with a 3D environment (via Google earth). Now, if you were to combine these two things together, eliminate the video-game element and add, say... either a simulation of troop deployments or real-live data of troop deployments, now you have a new way of displaying and controlling the battlefield.

Multi-user interaction, in particular as multi-user collaboration, is where we'll see the most usage of this technology. This means that, in the future, we will have the choice of physically collaborating with multiple users on the same data.

This should make meetings interesting, to say the least...