Single-Point to Multi-Point

One of the concepts that has been most pervasive within IT since it’s inception has been the idea of the cursor or the pointer. We have had over all these years, almost exclusively, a single point of focus on our screens. The mouse has then been the universal interface to this concept. This concept was developed in the days when computers could only cope with doing one thing on a screen at any one time. Many of us prefer the keyboard because it allows us to get an approximation of a multi-point interface but really all we are doing is driving a single point interface as fast as we can. It’s a bit like a virtuoso pianist using all of their fingers but only pressing one key at a time.

This video and this link show the way it could be; bi-manual, multi-point and multi-user interactions on a graphical interaction surface. It’s one of those videos that makes you think about the way it could be. It would mean a completely new way of looking at software, but it could be so much more productive.