The future of Tablet PCs - Multi-Touch

I keep getting asked about iPhone style multi-touch features on Tablet PCs. I personally love the idea of multi-touch. I think that after 27 years of the PC mouse, it’s high time that we graduated from a single point interface.

Current Tablet PC hardware does not support multi-touch in the iPhone sense. There are a number of Tablet PCs that support both Pen and Touch input, but only via one point at a time.

Does multi-touch make you think of scene in the Minority Report with Tom Cruise? An interface like that would have all sorts of un-dreamed of practical applications. Most technically inclined folks are aware of the experiments of the Microsoft Surface team. They have been demonstrating prototypes of this Minority Report style interface for a while now, so we know that this will ultimately become a reality.

The good news is that multi-point/multi-touch will probably reach the Tablet PC before it hits your desktop (or window, or wall for that matter). In fact the video below by a company called JazzMutant is a Tablet PC hardware demonstration on Windows XP that was posted to Youtube last year.

The demonstration uses both Pen and touch input, and it’s quite smart about giving the pen precedence over touch. That will make for an awesome input system.

I would hope that we will see hardware like this on the next generation of Tablet PCs in 12-18 months.