computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computer, computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and the development of both computer hardware, hardware and softw ...

, multi-touch is technology that enables a surface (a

touchpad A touchpad or trackpad is a type of pointing device. Its largest component is a tactile sensor: an electronic device with a flat surface, that detects the motion and position of a user's fingers, and translates them to 2D motion, to control a Cu ...

touchscreen A touchscreen (or touch screen) is a type of electronic visual display, display that can detect touch input from a user. It consists of both an input device (a touch panel) and an output device (a visual display). The touch panel is typically l ...

) to recognize the presence of more than one point of contact with the surface at the same time. The origins of multitouch began at

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in Meyrin, western suburb of Gene ...

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public university, public research university whose main campus is located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park (Toronto), Queen's Park in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It was founded by ...

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

and

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Murray Hill, New Jersey, the compa ...

in the 1970s. CERN started using multi-touch screens as early as 1976 for the controls of the

Super Proton Synchrotron The Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) is a particle accelerator of the synchrotron type at CERN. It is housed in a circular tunnel, in circumference, straddling the border of France and Switzerland near Geneva, Switzerland. History The SPS was d ...

. Capacitive multi-touch displays were popularized by

Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...

iPhone The iPhone is a line of smartphones developed and marketed by Apple that run iOS, the company's own mobile operating system. The first-generation iPhone was announced by then–Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, at ...

in 2007. Multi-touch may be used to implement additional functionality, such as pinch to zoom or to activate certain

subroutine In computer programming, a function (also procedure, method, subroutine, routine, or subprogram) is a callable unit of software logic that has a well-defined interface and behavior and can be invoked multiple times. Callable units provide a ...

s attached to predefined gestures using

gesture recognition Gesture recognition is an area of research and development in computer science and language technology concerned with the recognition and interpretation of human gestures. A subdiscipline of computer vision, it employs mathematical algorithms to ...

. Several uses of the term multi-touch resulted from the quick developments in this field, and many companies using the term to market older technology which is called '' gesture-enhanced single-touch'' or several other terms by other companies and researchers. Several other similar or related terms attempt to differentiate between whether a device can exactly determine or only approximate the location of different points of contact to further differentiate between the various technological capabilities, but they are often used as synonyms in marketing. Multi-touch is commonly implemented using capacitive sensing technology in mobile devices and smart devices. A capacitive touchscreen typically consists of a capacitive touch

sensor A sensor is often defined as a device that receives and responds to a signal or stimulus. The stimulus is the quantity, property, or condition that is sensed and converted into electrical signal. In the broadest definition, a sensor is a devi ...

application-specific integrated circuit An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC ) is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use, such as a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-efficienc ...

(ASIC) controller and digital signal processor (DSP) fabricated from

CMOS Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS, pronounced "sea-moss ", , ) is a type of MOSFET, metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) semiconductor device fabrication, fabrication process that uses complementary an ...

(complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor) technology. A more recent alternative approach is optical touch technology, based on

image sensor An image sensor or imager is a sensor that detects and conveys information used to form an image. It does so by converting the variable attenuation of light waves (as they refraction, pass through or reflection (physics), reflect off objects) into s ...

technology.

Definition

, multi-touch is technology which enables a

to recognize more than one or more than two points of contact with the surface.

popularized the term "multi-touch" in 2007 with which it implemented additional functionality, such as pinch to zoom or to activate certain

s attached to predefined gestures. The two different uses of the term resulted from the quick developments in this field, and many companies using the term to market older technology which is called '' gesture-enhanced single-touch'' or several other terms by other companies and researchers. Several other similar or related terms attempt to differentiate between whether a device can exactly determine or only approximate the location of different points of contact to further differentiate between the various technological capabilities, but they are often used as synonyms in marketing.

History

1960–2000

The use of

technology predates both multi-touch technology and the personal computer. Early synthesizer and electronic instrument builders like Hugh Le Caine and

Robert Moog Robert Arthur Moog ( ; May 23, 1934 – August 21, 2005) was an American engineer and electronic music pioneer. He was the founder of the synthesizer manufacturer Moog Music and the inventor of the first commercial synthesizer, the Moog synthe ...

experimented with using touch-sensitive capacitance sensors to control the sounds made by their instruments.Buxton, Bill
"Multitouch Overview"
/ref>

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

began building the first touch screens in the late 1960s. In 1972, Control Data released the

PLATO Plato ( ; Greek language, Greek: , ; born BC, died 348/347 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical Greece, Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of the writte ...

IV computer, an infrared terminal used for educational purposes, which employed single-touch points in a 16×16 array user interface. These early touchscreens only registered one point of touch at a time. On-screen keyboards (a well-known feature today) were thus awkward to use, because key-rollover and holding down a shift key while typing another were not possible. Exceptions to these were a "cross-wire" multi-touch reconfigurable touchscreen keyboard/display developed at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

in the early 1970s and the 16 button capacitive multi-touch screen developed at

in 1972 for the controls of the

that were under construction. CERN-Stumpe Capacitance Touchscreen

In 1976 a new x-y capacitive screen, based on the capacitance touch screens developed in 1972 by Danish electronics engineer Bent Stumpe, was developed at

. This technology, allowing an exact location of the different touch points, was used to develop a new type of

human machine interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fro ...

(HMI) for the control room of the Super Proton Synchrotron particle accelerator. In a handwritten note dated 11 March 1972, Stumpe presented his proposed solution – a capacitive touch screen with a fixed number of programmable buttons presented on a display. The screen was to consist of a set of capacitors etched into a film of copper on a sheet of glass, each capacitor being constructed so that a nearby flat conductor, such as the surface of a finger, would increase the capacitance by a significant amount. The capacitors were to consist of fine lines etched in copper on a sheet of glass – fine enough (80 μm) and sufficiently far apart (80 μm) to be invisible. In the final device, a simple lacquer coating prevented the fingers from actually touching the capacitors. In the same year,

described a keyboard with variable graphics capable of multi-touch detection. In the early 1980s, The

's Input Research Group were among the earliest to explore the software side of multi-touch input systems. A 1982 system at the University of Toronto used a frosted-glass panel with a camera placed behind the glass. When a finger or several fingers pressed on the glass, the camera would detect the action as one or more black spots on an otherwise white background, allowing it to be registered as an input. Since the size of a dot was dependent on pressure (how hard the person was pressing on the glass), the system was somewhat pressure-sensitive as well. Of note, this system was input only and not able to display graphics. In 1983,

at Murray Hill published a comprehensive discussion of touch-screen based interfaces, though it makes no mention of multiple fingers. In the same year, the video-based Video Place/Video Desk system of Myron Krueger was influential in development of multi-touch gestures such as pinch-to-zoom, though this system had no touch interaction itself. By 1984, both Bell Labs and

had working multi-touch-screen prototypes – both input and graphics – that could respond interactively in response to multiple finger inputs. The Bell Labs system was based on capacitive coupling of fingers, whereas the CMU system was optical. In 1985, the canonical multitouch pinch-to-zoom gesture was demonstrated, with coordinated graphics, on CMU's system. In October 1985,

Steve Jobs Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American businessman, inventor, and investor best known for co-founding the technology company Apple Inc. Jobs was also the founder of NeXT and chairman and majority shareholder o ...

signed a non-disclosure agreement to tour CMU's Sensor Frame multi-touch lab. In 1990, Sears et al. published a review of academic research on single and multi-touch touchscreen

human–computer interaction Human–computer interaction (HCI) is the process through which people operate and engage with computer systems. Research in HCI covers the design and the use of computer technology, which focuses on the interfaces between people (users) and comp ...

of the time, describing single touch gestures such as rotating knobs, swiping the screen to activate a switch (or a U-shaped gesture for a toggle switch), and touchscreen keyboards (including a study that showed that users could type at 25 words per minute for a touchscreen keyboard compared with 58 words per minute for a standard keyboard, with multi-touch hypothesized to improve data entry rate); multi-touch gestures such as selecting a range of a line, connecting objects, and a "tap-click" gesture to select while maintaining location with another finger are also described. In 1991, Pierre Wellner advanced the topic publishing about his multi-touch "Digital Desk", which supported multi-finger and pinching motions. Various companies expanded upon these inventions in the beginning of the twenty-first century.

2000–present

Between 1999 and 2005, the company Fingerworks developed various multi-touch technologies, including Touchstream keyboards and the iGesture Pad. in the early 2000s Alan Hedge, professor of human factors and ergonomics at

Cornell University Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...

published several studies about this technology. In 2005, Apple acquired Fingerworks and its multi-touch technology. In 2004, French start-up JazzMutant developed the Lemur Input Device, a music controller that became in 2005 the first commercial product to feature a proprietary transparent multi-touch screen, allowing direct, ten-finger manipulation on the display. In January 2007, multi-touch technology became mainstream with the

, and in its iPhone announcement Apple even stated it "invented multi touch", however both the function and the term predate the announcement or patent requests, except for the area of capacitive mobile screens, which did not exist before Fingerworks/Apple's technology (Fingerworks filed patents in 2001–2005, subsequent multi-touch refinements were patented by Apple). However, the U.S. Patent and Trademark office declared that the "pinch-to-zoom" functionality was predicted by U.S. Patent # 7,844,915 relating to gestures on touch screens, filed by Bran Ferren and Daniel Hillis in 2005, as was inertial scrolling, thus invalidated a key claims of Apple's patent. In 2001, Microsoft's table-top touch platform,

Microsoft PixelSense Microsoft PixelSense (formerly called Microsoft Surface) was an interactive surface computing platform that allowed one or more people to use and touch real-world objects, and share digital content at the same time. The PixelSense platform consis ...

(formerly Surface) started development, which interacts with both the user's touch and their electronic devices and became commercial on May 29, 2007. Similarly, in 2001, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) began development of a multi-touch, multi-user system called DiamondTouch. In 2008, the Diamondtouch became a commercial product and is also based on capacitance, but able to differentiate between multiple simultaneous users or rather, the chairs in which each user is seated or the floorpad on which the user is standing. In 2007, NORTD labs

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

system offered its CUBIT (multi-touch). Small-scale touch devices rapidly became commonplace in 2008. The number of touch screen telephones was expected to increase from 200,000 shipped in 2006 to 21 million in 2012. In May 2015, Apple was granted a patent for a "fusion keyboard", which turns individual physical keys into multi-touch buttons.

Applications

has retailed and distributed numerous products using multi-touch technology, most prominently including its

smartphone and

iPad The iPad is a brand of tablet computers developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple that run the company's mobile operating systems iOS and later iPadOS. The IPad (1st generation), first-generation iPad was introduced on January 27, 2010. ...

tablet. Additionally, Apple also holds several

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...

s related to the implementation of multi-touch in user interfaces, however the legitimacy of some patents has been disputed. Apple additionally attempted to register "Multi-touch" as a

trademark A trademark (also written trade mark or trade-mark) is a form of intellectual property that consists of a word, phrase, symbol, design, or a combination that identifies a Good (economics and accounting), product or Service (economics), service f ...

in the United Stateshowever its request was denied by the

United States Patent and Trademark Office The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is an List of federal agencies in the United States, agency in the United States Department of Commerce, U.S. Department of Commerce that serves as the national patent office and trademark ...

because it considered the term generic. Multi-touch sensing and processing occurs via an ASIC sensor that is attached to the touch surface. Usually, separate companies make the ASIC and screen that combine into a touch screen; conversely, a touchpad's surface and ASIC are usually manufactured by the same company. There have been large companies in recent years that have expanded into the growing multi-touch industry, with systems designed for everything from the casual user to multinational organizations. It is now common for laptop manufacturers to include multi-touch

s on their laptops, and

tablet computer A tablet computer, commonly shortened to tablet, is a mobile device, typically with a mobile operating system and touchscreen display processing circuitry, and a rechargeable battery in a single, thin and flat package. Tablets, being computers ...

s respond to touch input rather than traditional stylus input and it is supported by many recent

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

s. A few companies are focusing on large-scale surface computing rather than personal electronics, either large multi-touch tables or wall surfaces. These systems are generally used by government organizations, museums, and companies as a means of information or exhibit display.

Implementations

Multi-touch has been implemented in several different ways, depending on the size and type of interface. The most popular form are mobile devices, tablets, touchtables and walls. Both touchtables and touch walls project an image through acrylic or glass, and then back-light the image with LEDs. Touch surfaces can also be made pressure-sensitive by the addition of a pressure-sensitive coating that flexes differently depending on how firmly it is pressed, altering the reflection. Handheld technologies use a panel that carries an electrical charge. When a finger touches the screen, the touch disrupts the panel's electrical field. The disruption is registered as a computer event (gesture) and may be sent to the software, which may then initiate a response to the gesture event. In the past few years, several companies have released products that use multi-touch. In an attempt to make the expensive technology more accessible, hobbyists have also published methods of constructing DIY touchscreens.

Capacitive

Capacitive technologies include:Knowledge base:Multitouch technologies. Digest author: Gennadi Blindmann
/ref> * Surface Capacitive Technology or Near Field Imaging (NFI) * Projected Capacitive Touch (PCT) ** Mutual capacitance ** Self-capacitance *In-cell Capacitive

Resistive

Resistive technologies include: * Analog Resistive *Digital Resistive or In-Cell Resistive

Optical

Optical touch technology is based on

technology. It functions when a finger or an object touches the surface, causing the light to scatter, the reflection of which is caught with sensors or cameras that send the data to software that dictates response to the touch, depending on the type of reflection measured. Optical technologies include: * Optical Imaging or Infrared technology *Rear Diffused Illumination (DI) *Infrared Grid Technology (opto-matrix) or Digital Waveguide Touch (DWT) or Infrared Optical Waveguide * Frustrated Total Internal Reflection (FTIR) *Diffused Surface Illumination (DSI) *Laser Light Plane (LLP) *In-Cell Optical

Wave

Acoustic and radio-frequency wave-based technologies include: * Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) *Bending Wave Touch (BWT) ** Dispersive Signal Touch (DST) ** Acoustic Pulse Recognition (APR) * Force-Sensing Touch Technology

Multi-touch gestures

Multi-touch touchscreen gestures enable predefined motions to interact with the device and software. An increasing number of devices like

smartphone A smartphone is a mobile phone with advanced computing capabilities. It typically has a touchscreen interface, allowing users to access a wide range of applications and services, such as web browsing, email, and social media, as well as multi ...

laptop A laptop computer or notebook computer, also known as a laptop or notebook, is a small, portable personal computer (PC). Laptops typically have a Clamshell design, clamshell form factor (design), form factor with a flat-panel computer scree ...

s or

desktop computer A desktop computer, often abbreviated as desktop, is a personal computer designed for regular use at a stationary location on or near a desk (as opposed to a portable computer) due to its size and power requirements. The most common configuratio ...

s have functions that are triggered by multi-touch gestures.

Popular culture

Before 2007

Years before it was a viable consumer product, popular culture portrayed potential uses of multi-touch technology in the future, including in several installments of the ''

Star Trek ''Star Trek'' is an American science fiction media franchise created by Gene Roddenberry, which began with the Star Trek: The Original Series, series of the same name and became a worldwide Popular culture, pop-culture Cultural influence of ...

'' franchise. In the 1982 Disney

sci-fi Science fiction (often shortened to sci-fi or abbreviated SF) is a genre of speculative fiction that deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts. These concepts may include information technology and robotics, biological manipulations, space ...

film ''

Tron ''Tron'' (stylized as ''TRON'') is a 1982 American science fiction action adventure film written and directed by Steven Lisberger from a story by Lisberger and Bonnie MacBird. The film stars Jeff Bridges as Kevin Flynn, a computer programmer ...

'' a device similar to the Microsoft Surface was shown. It took up an executive's entire desk and was used to communicate with the Master Control computer. In the 2002 film '' Minority Report'', Tom Cruise uses a set of gloves that resemble a multi-touch interface to browse through information. In the 2005 film '' The Island'', another form of a multi-touch computer was seen where the professor, played by

Sean Bean Sean Bean (born Shaun Mark Bean; 17 April 1959) is an English actor. After graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he made his professional debut in a production of ''Romeo and Juliet'' in 1983 at The Watermill Theatre. Retaining his ...

, has a multi-touch desktop to organize files, based on an early version of Microsoft Surface (not be confused with the

tablet computers A tablet computer, commonly shortened to tablet, is a mobile device, typically with a mobile operating system and touchscreen display processing circuitry, and a rechargeable battery in a single, thin and flat package. Tablets, being computers ...

which now bear that name). In 2007, the television series '' CSI: Miami'' introduced both surface and wall multi-touch displays in its sixth season.

After 2007

Multi-touch technology can be seen in the 2008

James Bond The ''James Bond'' franchise focuses on James Bond (literary character), the titular character, a fictional Secret Intelligence Service, British Secret Service agent created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels ...

film '' Quantum of Solace'', where MI6 uses a touch interface to browse information about the criminal Dominic Greene. In the 2008 film '' The Day the Earth Stood Still'', Microsoft's Surface was used. The television series '' NCIS: Los Angeles'', which premiered 2009, makes use of multi-touch surfaces and wall panels as an initiative to go digital. In a 2008, an episode of the television series ''

The Simpsons ''The Simpsons'' is an American animated sitcom created by Matt Groening and developed by Groening, James L. Brooks and Sam Simon for the Fox Broadcasting Company. It is a Satire (film and television), satirical depiction of American life ...

'',

Lisa Simpson Lisa Marie Simpson is a fictional character in the animated television sitcom series ''The Simpsons''. She is the middle child of the Simpson family. Voiced by Yeardley Smith, Lisa was born as a character in '' The Tracey Ullman Show'' short ...

travels to the underwater headquarters of Mapple to visit Steve Mobbs, who is shown to be performing multiple multi-touch hand gestures on a large touch wall. In the 2009, the film '' District 9'' the interface used to control the alien ship features similar technology.

10/GUI

10/GUI is a proposed new

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fro ...

paradigm. Created in 2009 by R. Clayton Miller, it combines multi-touch input with a new windowing manager. It splits the touch surface away from the screen, so that user fatigue is reduced and the users' hands don't obstruct the display. Instead of placing windows all over the screen, the windowing manager, Con10uum, uses a linear paradigm, with multi-touch used to navigate between and arrange the windows. An area at the right side of the touch screen brings up a global context menu, and a similar strip at the left side brings up application-specific menus. An open source community preview of the Con10uum window manager was made available in November, 2009.

References

External links

Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known and Loved
– An overview by researcher Bill Buxton of Microsoft Research, formerly at University of Toronto and Xerox PARC.

contains a history of pen computing, including touch and gesture technology, from approximately 1917 to 1992.

* * ttp://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/ Multi-Touch Interaction Research @ NYUbr>Camera-based multi-touch for wall-sized displaysDavid Wessel MultitouchJeff Han's Multi Touch Screen's chronology archive
De
Force-Sensing, Multi-Touch, User Interaction Technology

LCD In-Cell Touch by Geoff Walker and Mark Fihn

Touch technologies for large-format applications by Geoff Walker
* * *{{YouTube, JVRuDY4X88M, Video: Introduction to mTouch Capacitive Touch Sensing Touchscreens Articles containing video clips CERN