EntertainmentThe Future of HCI
Sat, Jan 26 2007
Each year, TED 
hosts some of the world's most fascinating too see and admire on the greatest innovation about technology, art, business, science and more. What really was special there was the presentation of brand new way of interacting the machines - no keyboard nor mouse, but completely intuitive ways of interaction only by your fingers.
Research in multi-touch (inherently multi-user) user interfaces started back in the 1980s, then later Sun demonstrated it in its Starfire project in the early 1990s. Now Jeff Han and Apple pushed that stuff into the mainstream on the TED Conference.
While touch sensing was commonplace for single points of contact, now 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.
The techniques are force-sensitive, and provides unprecedented resolution and scalability, allowing to create sophisticated multi-point widgets for applications large enough to accommodate both hands and multiple users.
The possibilities with this technology are endless and if pursued by the right individuals or companies we could see a complete shift in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).
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