New Yorkers and the Touch-Screen

NYC Dorkbot at Location One: Dexterous Technology

Most New Yorkers are familiar with the touch-screen. Ever since the station-agents stopped selling tokens (does anyone know in what year?), the entrance to the underground is purchased from the automated tellers that line the tile walls of any station. Beginning with the universal prompt, “Touch screen to begin” and available in three languages or more, one can have anything from the single-ride to the unlimited metro pass.

However, as Jeff Han – from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU – explained, touch-screens such as the MTA's are fairly basic in their capabilities. The single point of contact is a limiting system, as the command of action becomes dependent on the first touch and renders the rest of the screen useless. Han believes that touch-screens could become much more complex, and is currently leading a team on multi-touch interaction research (that is, a screen that responds to multiple touches at the same time). As Han says of the possibilities, “While touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact, multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations. Such sensing devices are inherently also able to accommodate multiple users simultaneously, which is especially useful for larger interaction scenarios such as interactive walls and tabletops.”

Han gave a presentation on his research on multi-touch screens at the Location One Gallery last Wednesday, at an event hosted by New York’s dorkbot. His neglect in explaining the more technical aspects of the multi-touch system (they call it “frustrated total internal reflection”) was forgiven by the beautiful videos of the team’s researchers playing with various programs designed for the multi-touch screen. The multiple and simultaneous commands provide an amazingly different type of interface with graphic design, photo and video editing, board games, and map searches (to cite a few of the demostrations). They also provide dexterious alternatives to the keyboard and mouse, opening the way in making technology more compatible to our human form. As one audience member called out, “When can we play?”

To check out videos of the touch screen, click here.