The Digital Home of 2013: Reach out and touch something

Don Reisinger — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:36:29 -0400

Touching is fun. It's really fun to touch gadgets, and navigate user interfaces using your fingers. And while you're walking through your digital home in 2013, you'll be doing a lot of touching all the time.

Some laptops already use biometric finger scans to access data or locked devices. But the real growth area is screen-based touch technology to navigate data, applications, and functions. Touch has quickly become an important frontier in the tech industry and there are no signs of it slowing down. And with the advent of the iPhone and Microsoft's Surface technology, more companies are jumping on board and doing all they can to create products that offer an intuitive experience without sacrificing usability.

The touchscreen market is split into two areas: single-touch and multi-touch. Generally speaking, single-touch technology only allows you to interact with the screen in one area at a time. Most commonly found in smartphones like the Palm Treo, it's unlikely that single touch will be the dominant touch technology in the digital home of 2013.

On the other hand (excuse the pun), multi-touch technology is quickly becoming the most popular touchscreen implementation on the market. Unlike single touch, multi-touch allows you to interact with multiple points on a device at the same time and offers much greater flexibility and usability. Multi-touch will sneak its way into your digital home before you know it.

According to Microsoft, its Surface product should be available to consumers by the end of the decade. Surface promises to let owners control their technology in a whole new way -- "grabbing" data with their hands and moving it between objects with natural gestures, instead of using of a keyboard and mouse. Although it has yet to prove its commercial viability, Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates have said that this type of functionality will be begin to appear in the next version of the company's operating system, Windows 7.

Multi-touch technology is being used by a slew of companies. Apple, LG, Google, HTC, and others have publicly said that it will be a major focal point of their business going forward. With the iPhone and MacBooks already sporting the technology, there's no reason to suggest that mice and keyboards (or, for that matter, desktops) will be around forever. You heard that right: That pesky plastic rodent sitting next to you may be dying a slow death -- and it doesn't even know it.

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Table of contents from the Industry Standard special feature, Ten Technologies from the Digital Home of 2013:

Introduction: What your future really looks like: The Digital Home of 2013
1. The Digital Home of 2013: High-speed telecommunications
2. The Digital Home of 2013: It's an HD world
3. The Digital Home of 2013: Gaming gets real
4. The Digital Home of 2013: Reach out and touch something
5. The Digital Home of 2013: Automated home control
6. The Digital Home of 2013: Green goes mainstream
7. The Digital Home of 2013: Welcome to the cloud
8. The Digital Home of 2013: The rise of streaming media
9. The Digital Home of 2013: Online distribution of TV, movies
10. The Digital Home of 2013: Collaborating across town, and across the world
Sidebar: The castoff home technologies of 2013?