Multitouch Applications with AIR
Here’s an interesting Demo from the guys at Intuilab. It’s a multitouch system, much like the much-touted Microsoft Surface. Only this one sounds like it’s built from scratch and, more importantly for me, is developed in AIR.
That it’s built in AIR is pretty cool - certainly the first inkling that in a few years or so I could actually be working with and developing for multitouch systems, without having to go off and learn a more heavy duty programming language like C or Java or something like that.
Multitouch, as you see in the video above, is pretty much the next step in touch screen interfaces - instead of a single point of contact, they can deal with multiple contacts, and that makes many actions a whole lot easier. What this means for the user is that it opens up a whole new range of possibilities for interfaces and interaction, as well as being cutting edge and damned cool. It’s like you’re in Minority Report (in a good way).
I’m really quite excited about seeing this technology become a little more available - I had thought only Microsoft would be the ones promoting this kind of solution, but it sounds like a few more companies are ready to take them on. And I didn’t know until I started researching a little for this post, but the MacBook Air actually has a multitouch touchpad. It’s not a multitouch touchscreen, but how cool is that?