In today's digital age, touch technology is like a surging trend, completely changing the way we interact with technology. The graphical user interface (GUI) of personal computers has always required users to learn complex operation methods, but today's natural user interfaces (NUI) are designed to be smoother and allow users to easily perform multi-touch interactions. This article will take you through the history and development of NUI and multi-touch technology, and explore their impact on our daily lives.
NUI is an almost transparent user interface that evolves as the user learns, making interaction with technology feel natural and fluid.
The origins of multi-touch
In the 1980s, Bill Buxton's team began to study multi-touch technology, but it was only exploratory work at the time. He once pointed out that
"Multi-touch technology has a long history. Our work began in 1984, the same year the first Macintosh was released, so we were not the first."
These early attempts laid the foundation for later touch technology. As technology continues to mature, multi-touch interfaces have been widely used on smartphones such as the iPhone, allowing users to operate with multiple fingers of both hands, which is more intuitive.
Evolution of NUI
The concept of NUI was proposed by Steve Mann in the 1990s, whose work demonstrated the potential of natural interaction and was dedicated to finding alternatives to command line interfaces and graphical user interfaces. Mann's EyeTap technology fully embodies the concept of NUI, making human-computer interaction easy to understand through natural physical interaction.
In later developments, Michael Moore established an open research community in 2006 to focus on the discussion and development of NUI technology. At a conference in 2008, August de los Reyes, director of user experience at Microsoft, mentioned that NUI represents the next evolution of the user interface, forming an ongoing evolution from CLI to GUI to NUI.
"With the popularity of GUI, NUI has naturally become a new trend in user interaction."
Specific applications of multi-touch
In the practical application of touch technology, Perceptive Pixel and Microsoft PixelSense are two striking examples. Jefferson Han's 2006 TED presentation broke new ground for multi-touch interfaces by showing how people could use gestures to manipulate content on the screen. This seamless integration with physical interactions shows the huge potential of multi-touch.
Similarly, Microsoft PixelSense not only supports interacting with content using gestures, but also can trigger specific actions by recognizing objects placed on the surface, further promoting the development of NUI. This design that integrates real and digital interactions allows people to control devices in a more natural way in their daily lives.
Future Outlook
With the advancement of technology, the application prospects of NUI and multi-touch are still broad. For example, the gesture recognition technology introduced by Xbox Kinect allows users to use their own body movements to interact without having to rely on traditional controllers, creating an excellent sense of immersion.
With the increasing demand for natural user interfaces in education, games and daily life, many technology companies such as Apple have recently shown strong interest in 3D immersive touch interfaces.
"We are about to enter a new era of interaction, and NUI technology will become the mainstream way we interact with the digital environment."
In the future, our lives will be given new meaning by more efficient and natural human-computer interaction. With the further integration of NUI and multi-touch technology, are you looking forward to a world where technology is closer to our daily lives?