the art and observations of Ranjit S. Mathoda

For a few hundred dollars the Apple iPhone provides a multi-touch display you can control by touch and the Nintendo Wii allows you to control video games from a distance by gesturing with a wand like remote control. What if you could combine the multi touch gestures of the iPhone with the midair gestures of the Wii for $39.99?

Sure, Steven Spielberg showed such a device in the movie Minority Report (see video), but researcher Johnny Lee has created a super cheap system that works by buying the Nintendo Wii’s remote and using it’s infrared light sensing abilities:

He’s also used the Wii remote to make a low cost multi-point whiteboard and a head tracking virtual reality display, all of which you can see demonstrated in his speech at TED :

You can examine a variety of his hacks, and download free software to make your own input devices, at his website. Mr. Lee has also developed a number of other interesting projects, including a $14 steady cam and a novel way to win a paintball match.

Steve Hodges of Microsoft Research’s Cambridge office attached some infrared sensors to a jury rigged laptop to demonstrated a multi-touch laptop. It’s a pretty hacked system, but this is the future (as I’ve stated before).

See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulwA3n8AYM0

When I first saw multi-touch screens being developed in universities, I knew it would be pretty revolutionary. They later showed up in movies like Minority Report, devices like the Apple iPhone (my iPhone post), and presentations such as the one shown here: http://www.mathoda.com/archives/112.

Microsoft has now thrown it’s hat into the ring with Surface, a multi-touch table computer:

http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

Pretty neat, although they are targeting high end resorts and other such places as the first customers for their $10,000 computer.

I suggested desktop multi-touch would happen in an earlier post, stating:

Despite this recent history, I believe software that runs on your local computer without needing an internet connection is going to make a come back. Two things will cause this change.

The first is that multi-touch interfaces will come to desktop machines, allowing for new types of desktop applications. You only have to look at the Nintendo Wii to see that when the human interface to a machine changes, new forms of software can meet previously unmet or unknown desires.

http://www.mathoda.com/archives/123

As cool as multi-touch desktop computers are, I’m waiting for the first laptop/tablet computer with multi-touch capabilities.

Steve Jobs of Apple indicated that their multi-touch efforts were first directed to such a device, but they decided to redirect towards the phone market due to its size and the obvious integration advantages with the iPod.

I’m sure Apple and Microsoft and a few dozen startups are hard at work developing a multi-touch laptop… who will get the prize?

Update July 20, 2007: Microsoft research demo’ed a rudimentary multi-touch laptop.  See my blog post: http://www.mathoda.com/archives/167

For a few years most software innovation visible to ordinary users of computers has been in websites. After all, if you are an entrepreneur with a cool idea for a software product or service by making it a website you have instantaneous distribution to the world, can take advantage of the collaboration between users, and monetize it with online advertising.

Despite this recent history, I believe software that runs on your local computer without needing an internet connection is going to make a come back. Two things will cause this change.

The first is that multi-touch interfaces will come to desktop machines, allowing for new types of desktop applications. You only have to look at the Nintendo Wii to see that when the human interface to a machine changes, new forms of software can meet previously unmet or unknown desires.

The second development is that software systems like Adobe’s Apollo (see http://www.adobe.com/devnet/videos/apollo_demo07/index.html) make it possible for websites to easily distribute a desktop application to their users that will work even without an internet connection. So you can use ebay, without being connected all the time.

This should all be rather useful, if our broadband wireless internet goes down.