8. Conclusion

The Start of a New Era

We’ve given you a good introduction to today’s touchscreen landscape, though it’s still very far from being a complete overview. There are any number of other technologies out there that have yet to break through or are still in their infancy. One example is LucidTouch, developed by Mitsubishi and Microsoft, which can simulate a transparent screen. You can point from behind the screen and "your hands" are seen on it as a silhouette. This gets around one of the disadvantages of touchscreens, namely that your finger actually hides what you’re pointing at, which presumably is what you need to see.

But from what we’ve reported, you should realize two things. The first is that most of the technologies appearing today on prototypes, that you might think are straight out of science fiction, were in fact invented 20 or 30 years ago. They were just too far ahead of their time — too expensive and complex to implement in PCs that were just discovering graphical interfaces. Today the situation has changed, and those obstacles are out of the way. The success of Jeff Han, Microsoft and Apple has fired the starting gun of a new IT land rush, and the territory to be grabbed is tactile.

Windows Seven will have a tactile interface

So the race is on, and the first three competitors we mentioned seem to have a head start, but in fact, there’s a whole field of companies behind them that already have prototypes in their labs. While the field is still wide open hardware-wise, on the software side things are likely to be sewed up pretty quickly. Neither Apple nor Microsoft is hiding the fact that they want to add "tactility" to the interfaces of the upcoming versions of their operating systems, so Mr. and Mrs. Joe Sixpack should soon be able to start sharing in the fun. But how will it all impact our day-to-day computing experience? Some go so far as to predict the disappearance of the mouse within five years. We’ll be watching. To paraphrase a famous philosopher: Bring it on!”