Multitouch for Commerical Art and CAD

The idea of using a drafting style form factor for multitouch is not new, but when would that form factor make sense and what would you need to create a compelling single-user productivity device?

One of the best applications for a drafting-style form factor would be for commercial artists working with products like the Adobe Creative Suite and architectural/mechanical draftsmen that utilize CAD systems. In fact, I believe that the use of multitouch in these professionals will become common place in ten years.

I spent three years of High School studying drafting - this was back in the late 70's and early 80's - and I always found the drafting table to be a delightful form factor. The drafting table form factor had been perfected over the course of at least 100 years, so the working posture associated with drafting is extremely comfortable. In my opinion, and from direct experience, the drafting table form factor is perfect for working long hours. In addition, unlike a regular desk, the drafting table is focused on one task - drawing - allowing laser like focus and enabling flow.

Multitouch tables, tipped at the angle of a standard drafting table with leg room underneath, would be an outstanding form factor. In addition to supporting multitouch with fingers it would also need to support pen-based input and potentially tangible objects like the tagged objects used on Surface. That last bit would require tag objects with strong friction surfaces or magnetism.

So having thought about this a lot I was absolutely delighted when I discovered, via SolidSmak, that a team of researchers from Media Interaction Lab of Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences had been thinking of many of the same things and had in fact implemented the ideas in a project called Flux. Flux is a flexible multitouch drafting table that supports the use of both multiouch- and pen-based interactions. They go a step further than my musings by integrating peripherals for setting the line-weight and color of pen devices and by making the form factor adjustable so it can be placed in drafting, horizontal, and vertical positions. Check out the video below to see how it works. Great work guys!