Multitouch

I came across the following video of a toddler using an iPad for the first time. It’s amazing to watch and see how quickly she is able to acclimate to the touchscreen interface and navigate to and launch the apps she wants. I certainly haven’t seen kids able to do this with the traditional mouse/keyboard combo much less a touchpad on a laptop or netbook.

This is exactly the reason I was optimistic for the JooJoo … and why I’m optimistic for the iPad and the HP Slate, and touchscreens in general … it’s the touch-based user input which is poised to radically reshape and simplify the personal computing experience.

The accompanying blog post at laughing squid provides a nice write-up and analysis of the UX experiment. The concluding remarks are interesting:

Most of all, though, it’s cool to consider that as one of the new Children of Cyberspace, her expectations about computing will be shaped by the fact that she’s growing up in a touchscreen world.

The video along with this remark instantly reminded me of the TED conference where Jeff Han presented his multitouch interface and expressed his disappointment, in regards to the $100 laptop, of introducing a new generation to computing with the standard mouse and pointer interface.

It’s also amazing to remember seeing this video is 2006, where multitouch seemed like some conceptual idea that would never find its way into any real consumer-level product – only about a year later the iPhone was introduced.