randomwisdom.com

Here's a tech demo of a touchscreen. Users can manipulate the interface with several fingers. Almost all touchscreens and all interfaces today are limited to a single pointer, a single input at once.

It reminds me of the interface in Minority Report, of course, but it also reminds me of a game I saw in an arcade here. You have to collect cards in order to play the game. When you start, you place these cards on a battlefield. They represent your troop formations; you rotate them and move them around to organize your forces in order to take a goal. When I saw a few people playing the game, they used both hands to move their troops around. Much more efficient than using a single mouse pointer and trying to drag troops, and then rotate them.

It's interesting; while a lot of companies talk about revolutions in user interfaces, we haven't had a real revolution since the first GUIs came out. Most of the enhancements have been cosmetic, with a few minor functionality improvements along the way. We still use a menu bar and buttons in the corner to close our rectangular interface spaces (or "windows" if you will), and a single pointer, just as we did 20 years ago. But a touchscreen where you can use your whole hand, or both hands to interact-- I can see this going several possible directions. While wielding two mice and trying to coordinate button clicks would be cumbersome, moving your fingers around on the surface your data is on is very intuitive. Here's the way I'd see something like this working out. Hit a single button to lock or unlock the windows. When they're locked, you can interact with them in a normal fashion, like scrolling within a window, clicking buttons, entering text, whatever. When they're unlocked, you can move, rotate, resize. Move with one finger, flick them around like cards on a desk. Rotate and resize with several fingers. Flip them over by taking two fingers apart and moving them together, just like flipping over a card. Make some restrictions on bubble size so that it's never impossible to accidentally make them too small to manipulate. It would be fun to play around with.

Such a new interface needs to come with some sandbox software too. Just as Solitaire and Minesweeper gave people a handle on how to use a mouse, maybe introduce a card game, where you can flick cards around and watch them, along with that lava-lamp app and some other demo stuff.