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Multimodal, Multitouch Gaming Gaining Traction
andylim writes "Several universities and commercial entities are developing multimodal, multitouch games, such as a card game using iPhones for individual hands and an iPad for public information, and an iPad Scrabble game that lets you use your iPhone to see your letter tiles. Of course, it's an extremely expensive setup right now, but over time it will become cheaper. It's also pretty cool, so why wouldn't you want to play board/card/strategy games like this?"
In the interest of truth, how about the commenters in this thread start by telling us if they own or have used at length an iPhone, Ipod Touch, or an iPad. I think that if we pay more attention to the people who have something that they know to add we might discover something useful here.
I mean, sheesh - if you want to see people holding forth on things they know nothing about you can always tune in the Fox channel. We're better than that here, aren't we? This "I heard it was bad so it must be" nonsense isn't doing anyone any good. It's a product, not a philosophical statement - so get down off of those high horses and let's discuss this like men and women.
The only multitouch demonstration on any of the videos was rotating the playing cards (to little effect anyway).
Why is "multitouch" specifically such a buzzword, and not just "touch" on its own? Multitouch has so far had weird implications on what sort of appendage/stylus you can use on the surface, whereas single touch does not. Plus, you can effectively do pinch/zoom on a typically single-touch panel, just not rotations.
simply, multitouch refers to a type of screen (capacitive in this case) that can track more than one point of contact simultaneously.
the other type of popular touchscreen is resistive, this is what is used on my htc touch pro2.
if you put three fingers on the surface of the screen, one after another (like how you'd press ctrl-alt-del), it would look like the following:
capacitive: _ _ _
resistive: _
on the resistive screen, whichever spot you touched first is "it".