Events - Colloquia & Seminars

CCIS Colloquium Spring 2008

Towards useful and usable multi-touch systems

Speaker: Daniel Wigdor

Affiliation: University of Toronto and Mitsubishi Labs

Date: Monday, February 25, 2008

Talk: 10:30 a.m., 366 WVH

Abstract

Multi-touch and multi-user systems have recently garnered much attention, enabled by new technologies and openness to new input paradigms. Interfaces built for these technologies are immediately compelling: users can engage with the system in new ways, with higher degrees of input freedom, new types of parallelism, and a reduced gap between data and input. Despite these and other advantages, commercial implementations have largely been anticipated by nearly 20 years in the research community. The current state of the art leads us to ask: "now we have multi-touch: we can pinch, zoom, pan, and draw. What comes next?"

In this talk, I will give an overview of research in multi-touch systems. I will describe our early-stages work seeking to begin to move past the 'wow' factor of such devices, towards systems which are truly usable by and useful to their users, and which offer real advantages over traditional systems. I will describe our multifaceted approach of employing both bottom-up and top-down techniques to building our 'table-centric interactive space', which has included studies of long-term use, an examination of perceptual and motor abilities, and, recently, in-situ group studies. This process has yielded new interaction designs, novel direct-touch input paradigms, and new knowledge of various relevant aspects of human performance, all of which are helping to lead our research to its next phase.