Multi Touch Technology; The Birth

Multi-touch
Multi-touch screen
On touchscreen displays, multi-touch refers to
the ability to simultaneously register three or
more distinct positions of input touches. It is
often used to describe other, more limited
implementations, like Gesture-Enhanced Single-
Touch, Dual-Touch or real Multi-Touch.
The interaction of touch and movement on
surfaces is a function on electronic visual displays
and touchpad pointing devices to interact with
content. It is an intermediary connection and
detection method from hardware to computer
software, to enact a users intention.

Implementations
Multi-touch has been implemented in several
different ways, depending on the size and type of
interface. The most popular form are mobile
devices ( iPhone, iPod Touch), touchtables
(Microsoft Surface) and walls. Both touchtables
and touch walls project an image through acrylic
or glass, and then back-light the image with LEDs.
Types
Bending Wave Touch
Dispersive Signal Touch (DST)
In-Cell
Infrared Touch (IR)
Optical touch technology
Near Field Imaging (NFI)
Optical Imaging
Projected Capacitive Touch (PST)
Resistive Touch
Surface Acoustic Wave Touch (SAW)
Surface Capacitive Touch
The optical touch technology functions when a
finger or an object touches the surface, causing
the light to scatter, the reflection is caught with
sensors or cameras that send the data to software
which dictates response to the touch, depending
on the type of reflection measured. Touch
surfaces can also be made pressure-sensitive by
the addition of a pressure-sensitive coating that
flexes differently depending on how firmly it is
pressed, altering the reflection. Handheld
technologies use a panel that carries an electrical
charge. When a finger touches the screen, the
touch disrupts the panel's electrical field. The
disruption is registered and sent to the software,
which then initiates a response to the gesture.
In the past few years, several companies have
released products that use multi-touch. In an
attempt to make the expensive technology more
accessible, hobbyists have also published
methods of constructing DIY touchscreens.

History
The use of touchscreen technology to control
electronic devices pre-dates multi-touch
technology and the personal computer. Early
synthesizer and electronic instrument builders
like Hugh Le Caine and Bob Moog experimented
with using touch-sensitive capacitance sensors to
control the sounds made by their instruments.
IBM began building the first touch screens in the
late 1960s, and, in 1972, Control Data released the
PLATO IV computer, a terminal used for
educational purposes that employed single-touch
points in a 16x16 array as its user interface.
The prototypes of the x-y mutual capacitance
multi-touch screens (left) developed at CERN
One of the early implementations of mutual
capacitance touchscreen technology was
developed at CERN in 1977 based on their
capacitance touch screens developed in 1972 by
Danish electronics engineer Bent Stumpe. This
technology was used to develop a new type of
human machine interface (HMI) for the control
room of the Super Proton Synchrotron particle
accelerator.
In a handwritten note dated 11 March 1972,
Stumpe presented his proposed solution – a
capacitative touch screen with a fixed number of
programmable buttons presented on a display.
The screen was to consist of a set of capacitors
etched into a film of copper on a sheet of glass,
each capacitor being constructed so that a nearby
flat conductor, such as the surface of a finger,
would increase the capacity by a significant
amount. The capacitors were to consist of fine
lines etched in copper on a sheet of glass – fine
enough (80 μm) and sufficiently far apart (80 μm)
to be invisible (CERN Courier April 1974 p117). In
the final device, a simple lacquer coating
prevented the fingers from actually touching the
capacitors.

Multi-touch technology began in 1982, when the
University of Toronto's Input Research Group
developed the first human-input multi-touch
system. The system used a frosted-glass panel
with a camera placed behind the glass. When a
finger or several fingers pressed on the glass, the
camera would detect the action as one or more
black spots on an otherwise white background,
allowing it to be registered as an input. Since the
size of a dot was dependent on pressure (how
hard the person was pressing on the glass), the
system was somewhat pressure-sensitive as well.

In 1983, Bell Labs at Murray Hill published a
comprehensive discussion of touch-screen based
interfaces. In 1984, Bell Labs engineered a
touch screen that could change images with more
than one hand. In 1985, the University of Toronto
group including Bill Buxton developed a multi-
touch tablet that used capacitance rather than
bulky camera-based optical sensing systems.
A breakthrough occurred in 1991, when Pierre
Wellner published a paper on his multi-touch
“ Digital Desk”, which supported multi-finger and
pinching motions.
Various companies expanded upon these
inventions in the beginning of the twenty-first
century. The company Fingerworks developed
various multi-touch technologies between 2001
and 2005, including Touchstream keyboards and
the iGesture Pad. Several studies of this
technology were published in the early 2000s by
Alan Hedge, professor of human factors and
ergonomics at Cornell University.

Apple acquired Fingerworks and its multi-touch
technology in 2005. Mainstream exposure to
multi-touch technology occurred in 2007 when
the iPhone gained popularity, with Apple stating
they 'invented multi touch' as part of the iPhone
announcement, however both the function
and the term predate the announcement or
patent requests. Publication and demonstration
using the term Multi-touch by Jefferson Y. Han in
2005 predates these,[16] but Apple did give multi-
touch wider exposure through its association with
their new product and were the first to introduce
multi-touch on a mobile device. Microsoft's
table-top touch platform Microsoft Surface, which
started development in 2001, interacts with both
the users touch and their electronic devices.
Similarly, in 2001, Mitsubishi Electric Research
Laboratories (MERL) began development of a
multi-touch, multi-user system called
DiamondTouch, also based on capacitance but
able to differentiate between multiple
simultaneous users (or rather, the chairs in which
each user is seated or the floorpad the user is
standing on); the Diamondtouch became a
commercial product in 2008.
Small-scale touch devices are rapidly becoming
commonplace, with the amount of touch screen
telephones expected to increase from 200,000
shipped in 2006 to 21 million in 2012. More
robust and customizable multi-touch and gesture-
based solutions are beginning to become
available, with interfaces that register multiple
touch points and gestures.

Brands and manufacturers
A virtual keyboard on an iPad
There have been large companies in recent years
that have expanded into the growing multi-touch
industry, with systems designed for everything
from the casual user to multinational
organizations.
Laptop manufacturers have begun to include
multi-touch trackpads on their laptops, as well as
constructing tablet computers such as the iPad
that respond to touch input rather than
traditional stylus input. Synaptics has been a
major supplier and developer of multi-touch
technology for this market.
In the wake of the iPhone, several mobile phone
manufacturers have begun to replace traditional
push-button interfaces with multi-touch
interfaces on their handheld devices as well. So
far, such innovations are mostly restricted to the
higher-end smartphones used for web browsing
and computing in addition to phone-based
functions.
A few companies are focusing on large-scale
surface computing rather than personal
electronics, either large multi-touch tables or wall
surfaces. These systems are generally used by
government organizations, museums, and
companies as a means of information or exhibit
display.
Apple Inc. is the active holder of the trade mark
"Multi-touch" and is the final stages of getting
registration, and, correspondingly, lists
"Multi-Touch" on their page of trademarks.
Apple was also awarded a patent covering multi-
touch on 20 January 2009.
Software
Operating systems
Many recent operating systems support multi-
touch, including Mac OS X, Windows 7 and
Ubuntu (full support since version 10.10, partial
support in 10.04), Apple's iOS, Nokia's Symbian ^3
OS on the flagship model Nokia N8 & the Nokia
E7, Samsung's Bada, Google's Android, Palm's
webOS, Microsoft's Windows Phone 7, BlackBerry
OS 5.0 (on Storm models) and 6.0, Xandros.
Applications develop and design for
multitouch :
Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7:
Microsoft Blackboard is a physics puzzle game.
Microsoft Garden Pond is a game where you
move fish by tapping on the water.
Microsoft Rebound is a cool two-player ball
game. Reminds of flipper.
Microsoft Surface Collage lets you create a
collage of pictures by dragging, resizing and
rotating them on a canvas. The collage can then
be saved as a picture and be set as the
background.
Microsoft Surface Globe is Bing Maps 3D
(Virtual Earth 3D), but with multitouch input.
Microsoft Surface Lagoon is a screensaver that
lets you tap on the water to scare the fish.
Windows 7 built-in:
Panning is enabled “everywhere” where
scrollbars exist.
Paint support multi touch finger painting.
Hearts/Solitaire have been optimized for
multitouch.
Taskbar Jump Lists by dragging the icons
upwards.
Optimisation for multitouch in Windows Photo
Viewer and XPS Viewer and Windows Live
Photo Gallery
On-Screen Keyboard works with multitouch.
Internet Explorer 8 supports basic gestures
Other
EarthPlusPlus (Multitouch Google Earth)
Marine route navigation
BumpTop 3D Desktop
Fishbowl- offline Facebook from Microsoft.
Crazy Coins is an ATM that spits out money to
be collected by piggy banks
Firefox Browser with basic gestures support
(beginning with version Firefox 4)
Popular culture references
Pop culture has also portrayed potential uses of
multi-touch technology in the future, including
several installments of the Star Trek franchise.
The television series CSI: Miami introduced both
surface and wall multi-touch displays in its sixth
season. Another television series, NCIS: Los
Angeles make use of multitouch surfaces and wall
panels as an initiative to go digital. Another form
of a multi-touch computer was seen in the motion
picture, The Island, where the professor, played
by Sean Bean, has a multi-touch desktop to
organize files, based on an early version of
Microsoft Surface. Multitouch technology can
also be seen in the James Bond film, Quantum of
Solace, where MI6 uses a touch interface to
browse information about the criminal Dominic
Greene. In an episode of the popular TV series
The Simpsons, when Lisa Simpson travels to the
underwater headquarters of Apple Inc. to visit
Steve Jobs, the erstwhile pretender to the throne
of Mapple is shown to be performing multiple
multi-touch hand gestures on a large touch wall.
A device similar to the Surface was seen in the
1982 movie Tron. It took up an executive's entire
desk and was used to communicate with the
Master Control computer.