Why Touchscreens are not The Future

Touchscreens were hailed as the great interface revolution when they were first introduced by Elographics in 1974. They were supposed to free users from the antiquated keyboard interface, allowing the act of touching appropriate areas on a monitor to replace keystrokes. Although touchscreens have found their market niche, they are primarily utilized in public information kiosks as they have proven too imprecise and slow for any intensive data entry purposes.

Microsoft's newly introduced Surface is based around the touch interface, but unlike its competitors doesn't utilize a monitor which is activated by touch. The Surface features five separate cameras which record the motion of the user's hand on the monitor's surface. These five individual cameras are required due to field angle issues. Each of the five cameras has a small field of view in order to provide very high resolution and velocity in pixels per second, much higher than a single camera set up with a very wide-angle view of the table surface could provide, as well as allowing for a fully peripheral view free from object blockage. The cameras operate in the near-infrared not to capture the heat from the user's skin, but to keep from interfering with the light emanating from the surface itself.

The Microsoft Surface has been optimized for up to fifty-two touches at the same time, which is sufficient for four users applying all ten fingers at once and also having an additional twelve objects on the surface. The inanimate objects that the Surface can also recognize include a 3/4" square device which Microsoft calls a Domino. This Domino can be attached to almost anything so that Surface can actually interact with the object. It would at first seem as if the Domino should by all rights operate on RFID technology (the automatic identification method of Radio Frequency Identification which stores and remotely retrieves data using tags or transponders). Instead, the Domino tag uses dots to encode its information and actually looks like a domino of sorts. The Domino has single dot in the center of the tag plus three additional dots on only one side to allow for placement orientation, and then eight more dots which are interpreted by the Surface's operating system as readable data.

If a bottle of appropriately Domino tagged wine is set on the Surface, the monitor can then display data, or graphics near its base. The information could be as extensive as a list of how this vintage stacks up against other years from the same producer, a travelogue of the wine growing area, and even listings of wine purveyors who have this vintage for sale and their prices.

There are many futuristic Jetsonian applications for this technology, but all of them firmly remain in the field of gee-whiz gadgetry. The immense process of tagging the countless billions of consumer products just so a consumer can place it on a Surface and find out information about that product is absurd when compared to the ease of simply typing in the product's name in a search engine.

This technological perplexity lies at the core of why touchscreens will remain at the periphery of machine-user interfaces. Almost a full century and a half after the first typewriter was introduced, humans are still using the dated and ergonomically-challenging process of tapping keys with fingers to enter data. Although many alternatives such as speech recognition have been developed, none of them have to date posed sufficiently viable interactivity and accuracy to supplant typing. The day of pointing and touching to perform our daily office chores may still be years or decades away.