
Now if we could only improve the human interfaces on our government officials, perhaps by removing some of the manipulation features and replacing virtual views with real ones, things really would be good.I had been thinking of my Touch Table project for a long time. It can’t be compared (as in DOS to Windows) because it is just not the same. To change computing than all that has come before. SDave, don’t take this as beating up on you, but I would suggest instead that all the wonderous things interfaces like the one we have played with and interactive continuous speech recognition will do more Were you ever a green- (or amber-) screen DOS user? Want to go back to cursor keys only? It is not all about pictures, and I am sure you will latch onto the next thing as To the mouse-centric Superdave, I can’t think of anything I would like to do more than dispense with my keyboard and mouse. ‘Tis a long way between these thought experiments and their day-to-day application, but rest assured they are coming. Would emerge, much like two billiard balls colliding.
#Google earth multitouch how to#
The report object and data object know how to interact, and a specific report For example, if you have a spreadsheet of data, you can hurl a report object at it or vice versa. The latter lets you send an object into other objests and have The former enables you to hide or unhide an object much like a magician would. Two of my favorites are the slight-of-hand and the interaction gesture. You could stretch or compress it, you could grab it and move it to another You could set it into motion by spinning, flicking, twirling or similar hand-digit maniuplations. You can reach out and grab the object andĭo physical world things with it. That allowed for not only multi-touch manipulations, but for hand-digit gestures and interactions as well.įor example, imagine an object (whether it be a spreadsheet, 3-D graph, document, icon, window, image, you name it) floating in front of you in a heads-up virtual display. Our thought approach was a virtual, 3-dimensional touch space I suspect you’ll be hearing a lot more about Jeff Han, Apple and multi-touch interfaces in the next couple of years.Īltough only a conceptual project with no physical demos or prototypes, my partner and I imagined another multi-touch scenario almost eight years ago.

The photo-manipulation and mapping modules were also amazing. One of the sample programsįeatured an ever-expanding “family tree” of every known species in nature, complete with photos by dragging and expanding, you could zoom in infinitely to the branch of this massive tree that you The visual response to your touch is immediate and satisfying, and there are lots of multi-touch gestures that work. In any case, I spent quite awhile trying it out, and it’s spectacular. You can see Jeff Han narrating this demo in this video, although with bad camerawork. He also set up his eight-foot touch screens in the TED common area, so anyone could He didn’t say that Apple bought his technology, nor that Apple stole it-only that he’d known what had happened, and that there was a lot he wasn’tĪnyway, he returned to TED this year for a new presentation, showing how far the multi-touch technology had progressed (hint: a lot). Instead, he knew all about Apple’s project.
#Google earth multitouch software#
You can see a video of last year’s software here.Īfter the Jobs demo, I called Jeff Han, fully expecting to hear how angry he was that Apple had stolen his idea without permission or consultation (it’s happened before). Interface, which I wrote about in this blog last year. This was a miniature version of NYU researcher Jeff Han’s own multi-touch So “multi-touch interface” might be stretching it a bit.Įven so, as soon as I saw Steve Jobs demonstrate this feature at the Macworld Expo in January, I immediately had a sense of déjà vu. It’s not like there are all kinds of multi-touch gestures to learn. And even then, you use this feature in only one instance: to enlarge or reduce a photo, Web page or e-mail message on the screen


Now, the truth is, the maximum number of fingers that the iPhone recognizes is exactly 2. New ground by permitting more than one finger to touch the screen simultaneously. This “multi-touch” screen, Apple says, breaks Today, a few more notes from my visit two weeks ago to the TED conference…Īpple garnered many oohs and ahhs when it demonstrated the touch-screen interface of its new iPhone cellphone/iPod, which is scheduled for release in June.
