What is in this article?:
- MultiTouch: The Next Generation of Gaming
- Brighter, Faster, Smarter
- The Cool Factor
- What To Look For
- Next Steps
Over the last few years, a new generation of capacitive touch-screen enabled smartphones and tablet computers have emerged to dominate their industries. Along with a robust market for third-party applications and elegant hardware design, the sheer ease-of-use of the interface has made these devices an exploding, and profitable, product category despite the recent economic downturn.
The user interface that makes these products “must-have” items relies not just on touch, but on multitouch. This allows the consumer to use two fingers at a time to expand or shrink an image or even allow multiple users to use several fingers at once on the same screen. The new capabilities and “feel” that multitouch brought to smartphones and tablets is poised to bring the same competitive advantage to the gaming world. Just as multitouch unleashed the creativity of developers worldwide in the smartphone and tablet space, multitouch will do the same for gaming developers as soon as the hardware supports multitouch’s rich capability set.
To identify how best to implement multi-touch capabilities in gaming devices, one must first understand the unique attributes of today’s multitouch screen technology.
