Ripples: New Research From Microsoft on Multi-touch

Multi-touch designers and developers will find this of interest. Microsoft Research has published a design document on the user of auras in multi-touch. The document, "Ripples: Utilizing Per-Contact Visualizations To Improve User Interaction With Touch Displays" is a short 10 page PDF document with some great illustrations. From what I can tell they are not claiming strict IP on this so anyone can implement the design solutions explained in the document.

Personally, I think they did some really nice work and I hope to see this kind of thing integrated into larger multi-touch surfaces in the future. On small surfaces like the iPhone it's harder to see the value as I think it would just add clutter to the screen, but on tablet size to table and wall size it would be a great feature. Thanks for contributing, Microsoft.

Thanks to PointAndDo.com for the pointer to this paper.