Since the advent of the iPhone and the viral phenomenon of Jeff Han’s demos, touch screens capable of responding to the touch of multiple fingers or hands have captured the minds of a broad swath of the technology admiring public. Now, with the introduction of the extremely thin and light Macbook Air, Apple is consciously extending this functionality to the laptop touch pad (see this Gizmodo video if you are not yet familiar with these gestures.) Read on as Ideal Mechanism places this technology in context…

Although, as Bill Buxton chronicles, multitouch touch screens have existed in various research forms since 1982, none of them were developed to the point where they were practical for series application in a mobile device until about 2005. While it is not a great leap from commercially available projected capacitive touch screens to multitouch technology, the requisite controllers and firmware had not been developed. Therefore, to some extent one could say that the iPhone touch screen was innovative in its sensor technology as well as its interactive modality.

On the other hand, no one is claiming that the sensor technology in Macbook Air touchpad is anything new. In fact, Synaptics, maker of many laptop touchpads (possibly the one in the Macbook Air) is demonstrating a new firmware which will support these gestures without major changes to the hardware.
But of course, the secret to many successful innovative consumer electronic devices lies not in completely unheralded physical technology, but rather the elegant combination of these technologies with good product design. In this case, especially since Synaptics has so much control over the intellectual property and capability in the manufacturing base for touchpad technology, it is likely that Apple will popularize these features and they will spread quickly through the rest of the industry.

All it took was the will to implement the low and high level software behind the effects, and the PR machine to make the public want them. The main effects are-

• pinch to zoom with two fingers
• swipe with three fingers to scroll through groups of objects
• rotate with two fingers, for flipping images

Apple provides a quick tour which educates the user on these functions, and it only takes a few moments of attention to learn them. Of course, even such a small training hurdle may prove too tall for some users, but this is where the cult of Steve Jobs helps.

In conclusion, there are a couple of lessons we can draw from this-

• tomorrows great new interface technology is probably already in a lab today, if not twenty years ago.
• there are two main reasons why this technology isn’t already in products today
• no one has taken the time to make it cheap, compact, and reliable
• no one has packaged it elegantly in a device which makes it compelling and intuitive