Multi-touch. Most people’s first introduction to this futuristic user interface was the 2002 Spielburg movie, Minority Report. Manipulating a computer generated 3D environment with ease is where multi-touch comes into its own. For many, seeing Tom Cruise’s character flip and spin those images around was a kind of eureka moment, a realisation of how things might be ten years from now. What we didn’t quite know at the time was how we would get from the humble computer mouse to that super-slick UI. Did we ever imagine that it would be a phone?
Few iPhone applications demonstrate this paradigm shift in user interface better than Moonlight Mahjong, available now from the App Store. Exploring this simple 3D environment is just so easy with Apple’s implementation of multi-touch.
To what extent multi-touch is embraced by developers and users alike remains to be seen. Certainly a new way of approaching application design will be required, and in truth many applications will be better suited to a point-and-click style interface. But thanks largely to the iPhone, multi-touch has ‘touched’ the hearts of many of us and looks to be the interface standard of the coming decade.