This has been on the web for over a year.

What's with all the iPhone bashing all of a sudden? You've gone from the 'Jesus Phone' to the 'Stink Phone'.

PS: Not a card carrying member of the Apple Fanboy Club.

Very very impressive.

Hmm, kept thinking of using a real paintbrush with this to actualy paint in Photoshop.

I saw this a bit ago (as blts has pointed out), but that doesn't make it any less appealing. This is what computers should be. An interface that allows us full creative control using the motions we are already familiar with.

Ok, so maybe not everyone is familiar with them, but grow up in a WOP family and you talk with your hands. Between touch screen interfaces and chips imbedded in my brain ala Johnny Neumonic, I'm all for future tech to get here. Add in the nanotech that will keep me buff, beautiful and healthy without any work, ala "The First Immortal" and I'm set.

Transhuminism is alive and well folks. This video is showing us the first major step in combining technology with native human motion, which in turn will start the ball rolling to what we should become on the next step of human evolution.

While this has been out there for a while I am glad that people are finally starting to realize the brilliance of it. Even if it took an Apple release to get this on peoples minds. The possibilities with this technology are endless and if pursued by the right individuals/companies we could see a complete shift in HCI. So come on everyone get excited about the final emergence of this technology into the mainstream because we may not be far off from seeing that silly mouse and keyboard replaced by some FTIR Multi-touch technology.

Just to put things in perspective, research in multitouch user interfaces started back in the 1980s, then later Sun demonstrated it in its Starfire project in the early 1990s, so Jeff Han and Apple are merely improving and pushing that stuff into the mainstream, which is great and part of what it is to innovate.

BTW, how do you know that the iPhone is limited to two points of pressure? Maybe the current functionality uses only one or two points of pressure, but the technology may already support more. Now, whether that would matter on such a small screen is another story...

You can check out Tog's take on the iPhone UI here:

http://www.asktog.com/columns/070iPhoneFirstLook.html

I'm thinking about a competitor for the optimus keyboard right now.

A touchscreen keyboard.

:D

Since you brought up the comparison to iPhone. The biggest difference between iPhone and this touch device is that iPhone is an actual production model. That may seem like a nit, but it's not. It takes a lot to make something so hi-tech profitable and reproducable. Everytime we compare something like this to iPhone, we just demonstrate how far ahead Apple really is.

As btts said, this has been making its rounds on the net for a year. In fact, this was the first thing I thought of when I saw Jobs introduce the iPhone. I thought Apple might have even licensed the technology as the "pinch" was exactly what I saw in these tech demos before the iPhone.

Wow! Now I can draw sperm with all five fingers! At the same time! My life is complete, and I can die happily!

As cool as these videos are the software driving them is much more impressive than the hardware. Unless I'm mistaken, Han's multi-touch requires cameras behind the glass to actually see where fingers come in contact with the screen and rear projection. So as is, this isn't something that can go in your pocket or even hang on a wall. Apple's multi-touch hardware is impressive because it's thin and flat.

getgreg check out FTIR or Frustrated Internal Reflection here:
http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirsense/
http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirsense/

This is not only a silly gripe because this video has been around for a while, its silly because the last time I checked, the feature Apple was touting was called "multi-touch", not "duo-touch". Just because the "pinch" is the easiest technique to demostrate doesn't imply a limitation. Sorry, that comparison is an obvious buzz-whore connection to make.

February 2006?? this video has been around for almost a year!

"Han's multi-touch requires cameras behind the glass to actually see where fingers come in contact with the screen and rear projection"

2 things:
1. first off, when cameras are being stuck into 5mm thick cellphones, i wouldn't worry about size. his tech demo is little more than a homebrew prototype, full production models would probably be no thicker than keyboards today.

2. the point isn't the technology in making a multitouch panel, it's multitouch itself. the importance is the design of the software interface and how multitouch allows people to interact with computers differently. intuitiveness is key.

"Maybe the current functionality uses only one or two points of pressure, but the technology may already support more. "

wonder how much they will charge to enable that ;)

i cant wait to see ANYTHING with this, i dont care if its a hello kitty DVD kiosk, i want to use it!

What is a "WOP family"?

willyolio, you made my point, the significance of Han's work is the software.

Also, the cameras in this case have to be far enough from the panel to have a clear view of panel itself. This will make the overall size of the device rather deep, which in the age of LCDs and plasmas is a downside.

While you're right that an eventual device could be thin it also probably won't use FTIR.

willy, cameras being stuck in 5mm thick phones has nothing to do with it, since that is meant to take images of stuff 1ft.-infinity distance away. For Hans implementation, the camera would have to be placed about 3 or 4 inches away to cover a 5" screen area. Maybe a special lens could decrease that distance, or maybe a camera sensor the size of the entire screen. But the display would still have to be projected, meaning it wouldn't work with an LCD screen. So, its not going to be in cell phones, probably ever. Also, I think the point IS the technology in making multitouch a reality. As others have pointed out, the concepts for multitouch interfaces have been around for a long time. Capacitive and resistive touchscreens aren't able to accomodate multiple points of contact, so the technologies by Apple and Han are kind of a big deal. I actually find Han's LED matrix multitouch more interesting. If that kind of thing could be scaled down and integrated into a display and combined with proximity sensors and such, he'll probably pwn Apple some day, literally.

Neat and all, but I have to ask...Farnsworth. Philo or Hubert?

Infinite points of contact? That doesn't make any sense, unless you have infinite fingers (and it's not even correct).

But yes, this does demonstrate the possibilities. It makes sense for Apple to limit to two points of contact for reliability given the size of the device. And certainly we'll see more multi-touch, using methods other than back-projection (since that's impractical in most contexts), just as we've seen the JazzMutant Lemur, shipped by Cycling '74.

At the same time, I wonder if there aren't still lots of possibilities for tactile interfaces, which multi-touch screens generally are not.

Old, old news.

Thats funny, I am a Farnsworth and I'll tell ya what - we learned that patenting things makes financial situations much better. We never got youtube rich, or any rich for that matter.

@relawson

LOL! Isn't it great how ultracapitalist corporations can even make money from their worst nightmares, in this case Sarbanes-Oxley?

@Peter Kirn

The iPhone will succeed where Zune failed... it's the social, stupid! One word: Twister!

I just got the biggest conspiracy theory.

As you might know if you read John Gruber's Linked List it's not entirely unlikely that Apple is actually using Jeff Han's FTIR technology in the iPhone. Jeff drops a hint of something along those lines on his site. (Okay, so maybe it isn't the FTIR per se, but anyways, it's multitouch.)

Do you remember that Apple said that they had one more feature in Leopard that they wanted to keep under the covers until later? Also, do you recall that apple released no new macs at MWSF? That they did not demo Leopard at all there?

Well, doesn't it suddenly seem entirely possible that the reason for this is that Apple is making also the computer version of Mac OS X multitouch-compatible? And that all new Apple laptops, iMacs and monitors will be equipped with an FTIR/multitouch screen? And they didn't want to show any one of those components (new OS or new hardware) until the entire package was complete and ready to be released?

For those of you who don't yet realize what an amazing thing multitouch is and what kind of actual real-life applications it has, please watch the TactaPad demo reel. If Jeff Han's demo didn't amaze you, this will most likely blow you away (because it's a real-world application, not just a nifty demo).

(By the way, there's a more high-res version of that youtube video over at the TED talks site.)

You can actually make a FTIR prototype using easily available materials. It's only suitable for use in environments with controlled lighting, so I think there are better multitouch technologies for small commercial devices.

There is a growing community of developers making their own prototypes, we hang around on #ftir on irc.freenode.net, but the biggest bottleneck is developing good software. I think this is probably where Han will make his money.

This is Jeff Han's latest video which is a bit more impressive:
http://fastcompany.com/video/general/perceptivepixel.html<...

...or just buy a Wacom graphics tablet...

I can't understand why this relates to the iPhone at all... So Apple's forthcoming device doesn't support more than two touchpoints (or maybe it does - we don't know), but does that really matter?

Can you really imagine using more than two fingers on such a small screen? You certainly wouldn't do so for anything *useful*. Come to think of it, these five-fingered demos I've seen have *never* included anything useful.

Point is, the iPhone supports functionality appropriate to the iPhone; a very small device. Larger devices probably *should* support more fingers for... whatever application they're sure to eventually come up with.