Rumours abound regarding Apple’s acquisition of 10″ touch-screens, from the popular netbook theory (and our own) to Craig Hockenberry’s supplementary screen theory. Dieter Bohn at the iPhone blog commented on this latter concept, suggesting that a touch-screen-as-trackpad would be a great mouse replacement.
I wanted a capactive [sic] screen sitting to the right of my keyboard instead of a mouse. I could just slide my hand around in any shape that was comfortable and tap fingers, use it as a drawing pad, and then pick it up and go walking around with it to display stuff.
While the display avenue is something we’d consider a novelty, the large, multi-touch trackpad concept has us excited. For years, we’ve talked about how the mouse is almost an ideal control mechanism, and how it’s unlikely to be replaced on our desktops anytime soon. That’s because the mouse not only excels at basic cursory control, but it’s flexible enough to handle 3D movement for gaming purposes as well.
We can imagine a 10″ multi-touch trackpad replacing the mouse because it that could easily fulfill basic mouse functionality. Using, say, one’s middle finger to position one’s cursor, and tapping with one’s pointer-finger could result in a left-click. Tapping with one’s index-finger could result in a right-click; as long as one’s middle-finger maintains contact with the device, the different click-inputs can be calculated accordingly. One can even imagine a thumb-tap to be resolved based on its distance from the middle-finger contact point.
In addition to replacing the mouse, this kind of surface could display information in a GUI format; virtual controls can be displayed on a per-program basis. For example, virtual buttons can be displayed anywhere on the device, like say at the top, for very specific functionality, while the majority of the real-estate can still be used for movement purposes.
The only problem we see is that such a device has most of its strengths in the gaming arena, which is an area that the Mac still lags behind in. Still, multi-touch surface controllers are a real possibility, if not for the immediate future, for the not-too-distant one.
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