Multi-touch
A Multi-Touch Screen (English touch = touch, screens with multi-touch gesture recognition ) is a special touch-sensitive surface for entering data using gestures. The capacitive or optical touch recognizes multiple touches simultaneously, usually with the fingers, which more control methods can be used than in systems that can detect only a single point of contact at the same time.
Most screen and multi- touch screen are combined and overlap. The user can then tap the items displayed on the screen, move it or select multiple. Popular examples are the zoom and rotate images, by moving away from each other or two fingers to rotate around a common center.
History
The technology on which, inter alia, the Apple iPhone and Microsoft Pixel Sense based, has been developed from 1982. Already at that time took place first research on multi-touch devices at the University of Toronto and Bell Laboratories.
The further research on multi-touch devices already began in the early 1990s. Leading institutions were the University of Toronto, and the Bell Laboratories.
Apple had the technology in 2004 apply for a patent, and also tried the word multi-touch to register as a trade mark, but this was rejected because the term was considered to be too general.
In 2005, the French company Jazzmutant brought the multimedia recording equipment Lemur - one of the first multi -touch -enabled products - to control consoles in the professional audio and video segment on the market.
2006, the researcher Jeff Han of NYU by the demonstration of a multi-touch prototypes at the TED conference was known. That its multi -touch surface underlying principle FTIR ( Frustrated Total Internal Reflection English, German Frustrated Internal total reflection ) has the advantage that such surfaces are inexpensive and can be scaled to produce. A video of the presentation Hans was posted on the Internet a few months later and found wide distribution. Han was also marketed the first FTIR based multi -touch devices, to which he himself founded the company Perceptive Pixel, the multi-touch walls sold to the CIA among others.
Although already at the market in the first half of 2007 Synaptics touchpads this input method support ( for example, the Lenovo ThinkPad T61 under GNU / Linux), it was known only by the middle of 2007, introduced to the market Apple iPhone to a wider public.
Applications
In the music of the Reactable synthesizer gained a greater awareness after the instrument by the Icelandic singer Björk next to the Lemur was used on their last world tour Volta prominent. The Reactable combines a multi-touch surface with the objectivity of a tangible user interface and makes electronic music acoustically, visually and haptically tangible.