IT Expert Voice

From iPhones to customer kiosks, touch screens are an accepted part of consumers’ lives. Can Windows 7’s built-in support for multi-touch make them a part of enterprise workers’ lives, as well?

There’s been some skepticism from industry pundits on that point. But, particularly in certain vertical sectors, there’s likely to be interest sooner rather than later in what Windows 7 and multi-touch bring to the (display) table. Mechanical CAD applications are an obvious area, but why limit the benefits to dedicated and trained 3D CAD operators?

“Multi-touch is an important milestone in the journey to make 3D accessible to ‘every-day’ people,” says Blake Courter, co-founder of 3D direct modeling software vendor SpaceClaim, whose products are aimed at the engineers and industrial designers involved in analysis, prototyping and manufacturing. This month the company will launch the multi-touch version of its solutions, which lets extended design and engineering teams read and edit 3D models without the CAD complexity — and with the new version users can make those manipulations using their fingertips. The software supports interaction gestures such as two-finger rotate, pan and zoom, three-finger spins, and Courter’s personal favorite, four-finger box select, which does in one fell swoop what it takes a mouse many clicks to do on 3D models. (You can get a peek at SpaceClaim with multi-touch in action.)

“The exciting angle is personal productivity,” says Courter, who uses his own touch-screen notebook in palette mode set up at an angle behind his keyboard. “I consider that display to be an extension of the keyboard.”

Windows 7 applications updated or built with multi-touch in mind can shake up computing as enterprise users know it, moving things beyond the basic out-of-the-box OS support for gestures such as two-finger pan or zoom that are available to even non-multi-touch-aware apps. Though touch screens need support only two touch points to be compatible with Windows 7, software applications can take advantage of as many simultaneous touch points as the underlying touch sensitive hardware supports.

A big user market will indeed be the design, engineering and architectural arenas, says Lenny Engelhardt, vice president of business development at N-trig, whose DuoSense capacitive touch technology supports multi-touch capabilities for up to four fingers in Windows 7. Expect the main software vendors in these sectors to bring multi-touch to their products within the next year to 18 months, says Engelhardt, whose company received $24 million in funding from Microsoft early this year.

N-trig focuses on 7 to 17-inch screen sizes. Its technology (which also can support pen input) is used in systems including Dell’s Latitude XT and XT2 notebook/tablet PCs. Currently N-trig is the only vendor shipping input screens for laptops that support four touch-points simultaneously, Engelhardt says – and by late next year, its next-generation chipset will support ten-finger touch.

Health care is another vertical sector that could take advantage of multi-touch enabled applications. One example is electronic medical records systems, which doctors and nurses access in order to get information about their patients’ medical history, medications, and so on. “Touch is intended and best used when consuming information as opposed to creating information,” says Geoff Walker, product marketing manager for NextWindow, whose optical touch screens support two touch points and are featured on all-in-one desktops such as Dell’s Studio One 19. It also makes large-format multi-touch screens (up to 120 inches). “We think since this is largely data that is consumed rather than created from scratch by users, that touch will be significant there.”

There’s even potential for multi-touch to have a place in medical imaging applications. But to avoid fingerprints obscuring the image such applications may have to involve two screens: a large monitor for viewing the pristine image, controlled by a smaller touch-screen display which doctors, radiologists, and other health care workers use for their gestures.

Even manufacturing floor workers might be an audience for the technology as it relates to the control rather than the creation of information. For example, there might be requirements on line operations to use PCs to control two sliders that affect processes or devices, moving the columns up by different degrees but at the same time. That isn’t possible with mouse interaction, but “that’s easy with multi-touch,” says Walker.

Beyond the Verticals

It isn’t surprising that multi-touch on Windows 7 systems might find a home first in vertical applications, where its value may be more easily proven for a specific audience, before the technology is widely deployed at the level of the general knowledge worker. There is a price premium for the hardware. And with the global economy just beginning its recovery, enterprises might not yet be inclined to make bigger investments in capital equipment than they absolutely have to. The onus is on independent software vendors (ISVs) to get creative with what they can deliver as OS-leveraging and application-specific multi-touch capabilities in their Windows 7 software. That includes Microsoft, which reportedly will include multi-touch capabilities in Office 2010, though exactly what is as yet unclear.

Walker poses enterprise dashboards as one potential route multi-touch can take into the knowledge worker environment. “Dashboards are really popular as a means of access to enterprise information, so again the focus is on consuming information,” Walker says. Tap a function on a dashboard app that provides insight into a month’s worth of data, he proposes, and then two-finger zoom in for a close-up to the last day’s worth of data. That’s arguably a faster and more intuitive way to accommodate the intermittent access to information that dashboards were built to provide in the first place. “Intermittent access to information has always been strongly connected with touch,” Walker points out, like checking your bank balance at the ATM.

Maybe that’s not a killer app, but is killer even in the cards for multi-touch? Engelhardt thinks so. “It’s the user being able to access a multitude of gestures, a rich library of gestures,” he says, using more than two fingers simultaneously to treat objects on the screen surface as if they were objects on a desktop. Think about using five fingers to collect icons cluttering up a screen and swooshing them to the side, or stretching fingers over a piece of information you need from a spreadsheet, and dragging it with your digits to the printer icon to make a hard copy of just that bit of data. “Imagine that you can take a chunk of a database and drop it into a slide or copy into another program just by marking that with your fingers – that is slick and easy,” he says. “That will solidify multi-touch as something useful and fun.” N-trig plans a new release of its SDK framework that developers can use to develop and apply advanced, rich gestures.

Another potential way in which multi-touch could help the enterprise worker is in the area of collaboration, suggests Jonathan Brill, an independent consultant on multi-touch product strategy, design, and development. “That gets really interesting, especially when you look at global and geo-dispersed workforces being able to interact and having a common device to interact through,” he says. Today that collaboration often takes the form of dispersed workforces controlling each other’s desktops, Brill says, but efficiencies could be improved if each worker used a second multi-touch display as the point of interaction. “There’s a lot of room there for a device that you control together, and then pull information to and from to control on your own more appropriate device for doing things like text editing and manipulating spreadsheets,” he says.

Multi-touch is, in essence, the product of evolution, its supporters believe. “When you think about the trend over the last 30 years in computing interfaces, it has been to try and get people closer to physical contact with the information they manipulate,” says Brill. Users at home and in the workplace advanced from command line interfaces to the point-and-click and mouse model, but they still lacked the means to directly manipulate information as they would actual folders in the real world. “Multi-touch goes to that next step of being able to move that content or folders around, to have a tactile experience of it,” he says, though issues still must be resolved to enable the best experience. For example, it may be better for the desktop user of a multi-touch enabled office productivity application to interact with a touch pad that sits in front of him rather than with the screen itself, to avoid obscuring the content with which he’s trying to interact.

We’ll get there, though. “It took us 30 years to rethink how we did office operations to get to where we are,” Brill says. “It could take another 30 to rethink office operations to get to where we’re going.”

But by then enterprises already will be well on their way to absorbing the first few generations of kids who grew up with multi-touch as part of their everyday consumer lives, and who brought their changed expectations of how things should work with them to the workplace. They’ll play a significant role in helping businesses explore how multi-touch applications should fit into the enterprise, just as today’s emerging workforce is doing for social media applications. “If young people spend all their time on mobile device that have multi-touch for zooming, when they walk up to a monitor somewhere they’ll expect the same things to happen,” says Walker. And enterprises need to keep up with those expectations.

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