Just this past Friday, SPAWAR Systems Center Charleston — my day job — welcomed Jeff Han, founder of Perspective Pixel, to demonstrate the Command’s new 8-foot-long multi-touch multi-user (MTMU) screen his company developed. There’s something phenomenal happening here. It’s a real-life scene straight from Minority Report. I only wish I could share the video from the demo (security limitations).

There was a YouTube video (which now appears on Han’s website, too) going around a few months ago that showed Jeff using “blob” — an interactive lava lamp application — as well as a photographer’s lightbox and 3-D Google Maps interaction. There’s no mouse. The multi-touch sensors interpret finger tips and “gestures” as input. For example, a small counter-clockwise circle gesture instantly creates a context menu of sorts anywhere on the screen; say goodbye to the File Edit View menus ever-present in today’s standard interfaces. Using your index finger and thumb, moving them away from one another instantly zooms out on an object, and pinching them together zooms right back in. Han kept repeated it was “intuitive” for users to walk up and start using the MTMU screen, especially the Google Maps application, because it was so similar to a real paper map. Drag, pan, zoom, tilt, scan — all possible with quick finger gestures. It certainly looks easy enough, but then again this is the guy that actually invented the thing.

“Multi-touch inherently implies multi-user,” Jeff said. During his demonstration, two sets of hands were working with the 8′ screen simultaneously. Cool.

Where this is going is limited only by imagination. It’s such a new toy here at the Weapons Station that everyone’s chomping at the bit for a chance to play with it. When things cool down and we start designing actual applications is when the real fun begins. Watch this space.

On a related note, regarding Apple’s new OS, I read this a while back:

“I’d love to see some implementation of Jef Raskin’s ‘interfaceless interface’ principles in Leopard as well. For instance, if you sit down at the computer and start typing ’59 x 20′, the calculator should just automatically pop up and compute it for you. Same thing if you type something like ‘Dear John’; your word processor should pop up and begin a well-formed letter.”

Not a bad idea while we still have a keyboard and mouse.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 at 11 am and is filed under applications, gov, technology, work.