Now that Windows 7 has been released, multitouch is now substantially supported in one of the big two operating systems around, and countless new all-in-one desktops are being released with built-in touchscreen functionality.

Fans of the other big operating system — OS X — have got to feel a bit left out in the cold, though. Although Apple is firmly on board with touchscreen and multitouch to drive the interface of their iPhone and iPod Touch line of devices, the venerable iMac all-in-one has been left out in the cold… sort of.

Sure, it has the Magic Mouse, which — like its predecessor, the Mighty Mouse — is getting a very lukewarm reception, but there’s no on-screen multitouch in the new 21.5 inch and 27 inch iMacs. If you want to use multitouch in Snow Leopard, you need to do it by stroking the back of your Magic Mouse.

Still, the after market has you covered. Troll Touch has released analog resistive touchscreen kits for past iMacs and MacBooks, and the latest update to the iMac and Macbook line-up have seen them revise their product line. They now offer touchscreens for the 21.5 inch and 27 inch iMac as well as all unibody MacBooks and MacBook Pros.

Putting a touchscreen in your Mac is an expensive process. The iMac kits start at $1099, while a Macbook touchkit starts at $699. Still, if you’d rather manipulate your desktop by swiping your greasy digits across the screen, both kits can be found now on the official Troll Touch website for your DIY installation.
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My daughter stopped by the office and I couldn’t help but let her play with the TouchSmart PC and BabySmash. What’s interesting is that she immediately goes for multi-touch and it looks as if the commands are translated to a “zoom” button on the keyboard being pressed etc.

This is a demonstration of the capabilities Dell XT Tablet with Windows 7 the next generation of Windows with multi-touch capabilities enabled. The touch events were captured and converted to TUIO messages for Flash and C# applications. Although these features are currently limited to SDK supplied by NTrig we were able to still leverage these features using wm_touch to TUIO interface. This platform can be used to easily develop programs that will use Multi-Touch features in the future Windows. Applications include AudioTouch, SimpleDesktop, WM2TUIO, CompuTable User Interface.

Steve Jobs said people don’t read any more. But Apple is in talks with several media companies rooted in print, negotiating content for a “new device.” And they’re not just going for e-books and mags. They’re aiming to redefine print.

Several years ago, a modified version of OS X was presented to Steve Jobs, running on a multitouch tablet. When the question “what would people do with this?” couldn’t be answered, they shelved it. Long having established music, movie and TV content, Apple is working hard to load up iTunes with print content from several major publishing houses across several media.

Two people related to the NYTimes have separately told me that in June, paper was approached by Apple to talk about putting the paper on a “new device.” The R&D labs have long worked on versions of the paper meant to be navigated without a keyboard or mouse, showing up on Windows tablets and on multiple formats using Adobe Air. The NYTimes, of course, also publishes via their iPhone application. Jobs has, during past keynotes, called the NYTimes the “best newspaper in the world.”

A person close to a VP in textbook publishing mentioned to me in July that McGraw Hill and Oberlin Press are working with Apple to move textbooks to iTunes. There was no mention of any more detail than that, but it does link back to a private Apple intern idea competition held on campus, in their Town Hall meeting area in 2008, where the winning presentation selected by executives was one focused on textbook distribution through iTunes. The logic here is that textbooks are sold new at a few hundred dollars, and resold by local stores without any kickbacks to publishers. A DRM’d one-time-use book would not only be attractive because publishers would earn more money, but electronic text books would be able to be sold for a fraction of the cost, cutting out book stores and creating a landslide marketshare shift by means of that huge price differential. (If that device were a tablet, the savings on books could pay for the device, and save students a lot of back pain.)
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Multitouch interfaces are all the rage, for good reason, and a Mozilla programmer has been working to enable the technology for Web applications in the Firefox browser.

In this screenshot from Gomes’ video, the programmer shrinks and enlarges icons using a multitouch interface for an application running within Firefox.

Multitouch on Firefox from Felipe on Vimeo.

Firefox today can be controlled with multitouch gestures–a three-finger sweep up and down to go to the top or bottom of a Web page, for example, or two-finger pinch gestures to zoom out. But Felipe Gomes, a Brazilian computer science student who just finished a stint as a Mozilla intern, has demonstrated how Web-based applications, not just Firefox, can use multitouch.

His demonstration shows multitouch controls to shrink and enlarge icons, paint, select a region of a photo, and play Pong.

Multitouch interfaces, for example on the iPhone and Hewlett-Packard TouchSmart PCs, let the computer interpret the contact and motion of multiple fingers on the screen. And Apple MacBooks are equipped with multitouch trackpads.

One issue for multitouch, though, is standardizing the meaning of various gestures. Firefox and Safari on a Mac both move forward and backward in browsing history with three-finger sweeps right and left, respectively, but Safari doesn’t follow Mozilla’s example of three
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Apple’s latest operating system update, Mac OSX Snow Leopard, should be ready to roll on August 28, and while Apple says the new OS is “refined, not reinvented,” it’ll become the de facto competitor to Microsoft Windows 7 come October. We love a good argument, so here’s your fodder: five innovations for each OS being touted by their respective makers.
Mac OSX Snow Leopard:

Exposé Interactivity: The feature that shows all windows together is no longer a simple means for switching among them. It will be possible to drag content fromsnow leopard one previewed window to the other. Exposé will also work for individual applications by clicking and holding their icons in the dock. As a workaround for the miniscule preview windows in the dock, these improvements aren’t bad.

Smart Services: Control-clickers will delight in new context-sensitive menus that appear when you perform the Windows-equivalent of a right click. For instance, highlighting and control-clicking text in a Web browser lets you send the text to an e-mail or import it to iTunes as a spoken word track.

Smaller Install: Pony up the $29 to upgrade to Snow Leopard, and you’ll get 7 GB of your hard drive back. That’s not a feature, per se, but it’s certainly an innovation. The last thing we want is an operating system that’s continually gaining weight.

VoiceOver: Though it won’t be used by the majority of Mac owners, VoiceOver is arguably the most expansive addition to OSX. This tool for visually-impaired users essentially turns the trackpad into a screen reader, supporting special gestures to switch between windows and audio feedback when clicking.

Chinese Character Input: Okay, most of us won’t use this feature either, but it’s still pretty cool. After opening an input window, users can draw sketch Chinese characters on their trackpads and then select from a list of possibilities. It’s as good a reason as any to start learning.
Windows 7:

Invisible Windows: The answer, of sorts, to OSX’s Exposé lets users turn all open windows into bare outlines by moving the mouse to the screen’s bottom right corner. From there, shaking a window makes all others minimize, and shaking it again brings them back up. A related window-management feature lets you quickly size windows to half the screen, allowing for side-by-side comparisons.

Jump Lists: It’s no longer necessary to hunt through a folder of recent documents to pick up work where you left off. By right-clicking icons Windows 7’s new dock (a feature cribbed from OSX), users can jump to recent documents or perform common tasks, such as resuming an old playlist in Windows Media Player.

Internet Access to Home Media: Got two computers, or a friend who wants to look at photos from your last get-together? Clicking a button within Windows Media Player opens up photos, videos, and music for streaming to other PCs. No party will ever be safe again from your weird musical tastes.

Touch Friendly: Should the touchscreen craze finally take off, Windows 7 will be ready with a mode that’s tailor made for tablets. Start menu and taskbar icons are larger, and Web browsing can be done with a finger. Multitouch is also supported, with pinch and twist gestures for zooming and rotating.
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USB Multi-Touch Smart Pad

We’ve seen the power of multi-touch displays thanks to the iPhone and iPod touch, and Brando wants to get a piece of the action as well with their new USB Multi-Touch Smart Pad. Apart from being such a device, it also doubles up as a numeric keypad for those budding accountants. It supports up to three fingers where multi-touch is concerned, and supports the Windows operating system. Expect to fork out $40 for the USB Multi-Touch Smart Pad.
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HTC Touch HD
HTC Touch HD: multi-touched by the hand of Ballmer?

Pictures and video of a mysterious leaked handset running HTC’s TouchFlo 3D OS suggests Windows Mobile 6.5 will embrace multi-touch.

If Windows Mobile 6.5 does support multi-touch, it’ll put it back in the game against the iPhone and finger-friendly Android phones like the HTC Hero.

This news reaches us before any WinMo 6.5 screen has been repeatedly jabbed in anger as the initial launch isn’t due until October 1.

It had seemed that Microsoft were waiting for late 2010, and the scheduled release of the alleged back to the drawing-board re-write that will be Windows Mobile 7.
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What if you could “touch” and poke your Facebook friends? In the future, this may be possible.

Star Trek’s Holodeck has just became a little closer to reality with news researchers from the University of Tokyo have developed a technique that allows 3D holograms to be “touched”. By blending a holographic display, a couple of Nintendo Wiimotes and an ultrasound phenomenon called acoustic radiation pressure, the researchers were able to create the Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display. A system that can give the feeling of holographic raindrops hitting an outstretched hand or a virtual creature running across a palm.

The Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display consists of three elements.

* Seeing: The Provision holographic display, which produces floating images from an LCD screen using a concave mirror. These projected images appear to float around 30 cm away from the display surface.
* Tracking: The hand-tracking technology, which makes use of the infrared camera found in the Nintendo Wiimote and a retroreflective marker placed on the tip of the user’s middle finger. Although camera-based and marker-less hand-tracking technologies are easy to come by these days, the researchers chose a Wiimote-based system for simplicities sake. Infrared LEDs illuminate the marker and two Wiimotes sense the 3D position of the finger, thereby allowing the user to handle to floating virtual image with their hands.
* Feeling: Finally the Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display provides tactile sensation onto the user’s hand. This is accomplished using acoustic radiation pressure, which allows force to be generated at the focal point of the ultrasound emitted from the tactile display. When the tactile display radiates the ultrasound the users can feel tactile sensation on their bare hands in free space with no direct contact. The current version prototype consists of 324 ultrasound transducers with individually controlled phase delays and amplitudes to allow one focal point to be generated and moved three-dimensionally.

The prototype in the video below shows a user feeling a raindrop hit their palm and feeling a small virtual creature running across their palm. Since the system doesn’t require the use of a physical object within the workspace, the appearance of the holographic images isn’t diluted.

The researchers from the University of Tokyo believe the technology will find applications in video games, 3D Computer Aided Designs, amongst other uses.

Source: PhysOrg.

Schematic’s giant interactive outdoor display facilitates wayfinding and social networking at the festival.

At Cannes this year, delegates will literally be the first to get their hands on a new kind of interactive out-of-home installation. The multi-touch wall from Schematic, a WPP digital company, is a 12-foot by 5-foot display that provides a visual interface for attendees to interact with the festival schedule, 3D venue maps and information on local attractions using only their hands. With the touchwall’s social networking capabilities, attendees can also set up meetings and swap contact details via email.

Multiple attendees can interact with the wall at once. To identify themselves, attendees need only to touch their festival badges to the screen—each badge is embedded with a radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag.

Check back later this week for more on user interface design and interactive marketing shop Schematic and the wall’s potential for advertisers.
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