Hi,

I just wanted to write down item by item current status of MT/NUI/immersive technologies and where we are heading to… I’d love to hear your comments on this subject also..

1. There’s a lack of established standards in terms of user interface, accessibility (yes, it’ll be a focus area in near future), feedback, gesture recognition, fiducial marks, software development, APIs, data communication and hardware design.

2. Companies are in search of opensource utilities and libraries to develop their applications on. Not all of them can cope with (buy/develop) a high-priced Surface or any other company’s proprietary MT system (you name them here). There’ll be commercial companies who’ll be providing SDKs and there’s a risk that multiple SW development libaries which cannot interact will coexist, decreasing interoperability. I anticipate that there’ll be a boom in quantity of these applications until 2011, but then it’ll start shrinking.

3. (Particularly) Europe, as a whole, has a potential to collaborate and declare a set of standards of its own for domains I mention in 1). Also, there’s a need to establish a consortium which will centralize and semi-control related efforts. This organization will also act as a strong hub for research and development of state-of-the-art software. A primary funding mechanism would be in the form of corporate memberships with different representation and voting levels.

4. MT technologies will embrace with embedded systems and capacitive surfaces to lower the barrier of entering our daily life, i.e especially homes. Current pricing scheme enforced by companies only offers the deployment and use of MT in a limited, corporate environment. With the rise of new and cheap hardware options rendering projection devices unnecessary, NT will redefine the interaction styles and user experience possibilities of human beings. This will open up a broad set of business opportunities, new research and development areas and posibly new usability job definitions.

5. Compaies only selling customized hardware will coexist with those offering complete solutions for a few years, and then the number of hardware-only companies will shrink gradually.

6. While MT research dates back to 80s, there’s still very few known due to the fact that MT hasn’t entered mainstream market and indeed tries to live in high-end commercial arena. There’s still a wide gap and research opportunities with:

a) new h/w solutions (i.e immersive technologies, haptic/tactile interfaces, capable systems under direct light etc)
b) interaction methods (camera, proximity sensors, RFID, bluetooth, ..)
c) multimodal interfaces (i.e human face, hand gesture recognition, brain-computer interaction)
d) buiness models (opensource, rentals, ...)
c) pervasiveness and ubiqutiousness

What is your vision for the future?

Best
Görkem

some good points you made.

2. I believe the good thing about people that work (or worked) with open-source API/SDKs or that have developed for/with open-source have good understanding of the problems that are faced with getting different software to work together. With that said, I think that they develop with that in mind - to get their software to fit in with whatever the client uses easily. I know the solutions that NUI offers works with pretty much anything you’d want to use. And that adds value to the product. So the companies that get their software to adapt as easily as possible with that of their clients will be the ones who survive.

As you said about the boom in the industry. I agree. There will soon be a lot of startups offering solutions. Some of them with great ideas and great implementation, and others with bad ideas, or great ideas but bad implementation. The ones that really bring what a client needs and wants will be the ones that survive.

Just my 2 cents

great points, and let me now make an even greater point. NUI group is the only organization in the word of people specializing in this area, and experimenting with multitouch. If more of us learn to program in AS3 and get ahead of the game we ourselves could become the standard. Think about it, 3,000+ people all working together around the world, we would have many advantages over any other company working on multitouch because we indeed encompass the entire globe. I say we create some new kind of organization for the programmers on NUI where we can licence and share our code and develop applications before Windows 7 goes mainstream., The day it does we Port everything over, and presto we have a full suit of multitouch application ready to hit the market, and we hit pay-dirt. I am not talking about selling this stuff for huge mounts of money, but instead targeting the mass market and becoming the standard itself. Furthermore we can use other members on NUI that do not have programming experience to test and review the software. In this way we can address most of your points, and at the same time make multitouch a level playing field for everyone on earth!