multitouch Archives

If you’re a touchpad lover, then you’ll be in heaven with IOGEAR‘s new Wireless Multi-Touch Pad (GTP520R), freshly announced at CES. As you might guess from the name, it’s a wireless touchpad that supports multi-touch, which is pretty cool.

IGEAR Wireless Multi-Touch Pad

Anyone with a smartphone or tablet will be familiar with multi-touch and gestures, but most laptop touchpads don’t support either of them. The IOGEAR Multi-Touch Pad can bring multi-touch and gestures to Windows-based PCs and home theater computers (HTPCs), making browsing, scrolling, image viewing and navigating the web quicker and more natural.

Multi-select: double-tap your finger and select multiple icons, or a section for drag’n’drop
1 Finger Gestures: mouse click, right/left mouse click, mouse select, vertical scroll, back/forward command flick
2 Finger Gestures: pan screen side to side and up and down, object zoom in/out, rotate object

As you can see from the picture, the Multi-Touch Pad has six hot keys at the top to control A/V media functions such as volume up and down, skip track and home. With a range of about 10 m, the Touch Pad is ideal for the wireless control from the couch of home theater PCs and other media friendly devices. The 2.4 GHz frequency band is used and a USB nano receiver is included. To get an idea of size, the pad part is just under 5″ so it’s much bigger than a laptop touchpad.

“Multi-touch control is changing the way we interface with devices,” said Bill Nguyen, senior marketing manager at IOGEAR. “From tablets and smartphones to laptops and computer peripherals, people have trained their hands to use touchscreens comfortably and productively and our Wireless Multi-Touch Pad takes this control to the next level.”

The IOGEAR Wireless Multi-Touch Pad is available now for an MSRP of $79.95.

Tom Newman spoke to Timo of Multitouch Display about the multitouch display they are working on. These displays are multitouch and multiuser. You can have multiple people using the display at the same time. You can put up to 14 of these displays together.This system can run on a wall or tabletop. The displays are stackable and can be movable. The displays themselves are between 32 and 42 inches. They hope to get the display down to less the 6 inches. All the displays are run through 1 PC. The system can work with Windows , Mac OS X and Linux. They will be offering SDKs for programmers. The system will take programs created in C++, Flash or Silverlight.

Right now these displays are geared toward business and large organizations. It is found in business lobbies, museums, and hotels. However they do plan toward the consumer market. Since the what is on the screen depends on the application that are being given to it. It is just a blank screen without the applications. One possible consumer usage could be for games. This is an interesting technology and will only get better and more compelling over time