2007 Year of Multi-touch

Microsoft recently announced the release of their $10,000 behemoth Surface. The release of the iPhone is just a week away. And this past week Microsoft Research Cambridge’s Steve Hodges has taken multi-touch interface and applied it to a laptop. But you haven't hear the last about this year's buzzword technology - multi-touch interfaces.

Haven't seen multi-touch in action? Check out Jeff Han's now-famous presentation at the TED conference. If this doesn't get you excited about the possibilities of multi-touch, nothing will.

But why does multi-touch matter? From the perspective of user experience, I believe it can do for the PC what the Wii did for the console marketing -- it further extended the social element of human-computer interaction. It's no surprise that Microsoft's Surface marketing material focuses on showing the social aspect of table -- sharing photos, music, and other information. If the mouse and keyboard are any level of challenge to interacting with a computer, the multi-touch interface completely levels the playing field. If you have $10,000.

Of course, there are already some parody's on the technology and it's media hype. Even the iPhone hasn't been spared. It will be interesting to watch as consumers begin their initial adoption of the technology with the iPhone next week.