Itch1: Spell weaving

[Aloril]

Multi-touch demo at http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/index.html is
cool. However I feel that these are just first steps on the mountain of
inventions that are possible with multi-touch.

<aloril>    hmm.. 3D multi gesture ...
<aloril>    2 high resolution cameras and .. ;-)
<PirateHead>        and then suddenly using your cellphone looks like
casting spells in old fantasy fic flicks

I think fully utilized potential of even 2D only pressure sensitive
multi-gestures that can detect different fingers will look like somebody
is weaving spell(s). Probably most of time fingers would touch screen
with varying strengths.

Here is one quick idea: Use middle finger to enter text using something
like http://www.strout.net/info/ideas/hexinput.html .  Use index finger
to change mode to text entry/ search (file/google/wiki)/ cut/ paste/
move/ etc...  A bit like vim, except both modes (and more modes) are
available at the same time. Thumb could be used for some additional
modes. For example change entry mode from letters to most common
syllables or to most common words or depending on mode to most common
movements, etc.. This of course still doesn't fully utilize potential of
even 3 fingers.

Above is just one quick idea of what is possible.

With full 60cm*60cm (about 24") pressure sensitive multi-touch screen
that could recognize different fingers uniquely you could probably input
faster utilizing all 10 fingers in spell weaving than any traditional
keyboard + mouse can do. However learning full potential might require
multi year full time training to become competent wizard in spell
weaving ;-) 

You might want to also utilize some 3D potential too, tough full 3D
might be quite tiring.



Latest word seems to be that Neo1973 will be single touch only and this
is hardware limitation. However *if* adding multi-touch support in
*hardware* is easy by adding some connections and averaging multiple
touches in software to make it look like single touch screen: please do
it. There is no need to support multi-touch in software initially.
Reason: Set of people willing to hack hardware to add multi-touch
support is probably much smaller than set of people willing to add
multi-touch support in software. Difference in updating into multi-touch
support is probably even bigger for people willing to modify hardware to
get multi-touch support vs people that are willing to update software
for multi-touch support.

Even if v1 hardware will be single touch only, maybe its possible to
have limited fake multi touch. Software could recognize that average
point suddenly jumped and correctly deduce where second finger
touched/gestured. More might be possible by using some 'black magic'. 

Multi-touch experiments is one of my itches, I'll mail about some other
of my itches later.

-- 
Aloril <aloril at iki.fi>