Scalable Multi-Touch: Microsoft Surface crossed with the iPhone

By Erica Ogg on 29 April 2009, 10:31am

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Scalable Multi-Touch: Microsoft Surface crossed with the iPhone Image 1

Moto Development Group's Scalable Multi-Touch touchscreen tabletop computer display brings together a combination of technologies popularised by Apple and Microsoft.

The Scalable Multi-Touch display's touch technology is similar to that of the iPhone, but its dimensions are more like those of Microsoft's Surface. The prototype measures just 19 inches right now, but it aspires to cover an entire 50-inch tabletop one day.

The Scalable Multi-Touch display has been in development at Moto in San Francisco for the past two years. On Tuesday, the company released a video to show what it's working on.

Like Surface, the Scalable Multi-Touch display is intended to be used as a group workspace, with information on the screen being manipulated by hand. But Moto chief executive Daniell Hebert said the Scalable Multi-Touch differs from other companies' efforts, because it doesn't use cameras or projectors underneath the surface of the display to project images. This allows the display to be thin -- perhaps one day as thin as the LCD screen you're probably reading this on.

The display instead uses multitouch technology, which means you can use more than one finger as an input device. Moto says that you can use as many fingers to control the device as you want, and that you're only limited by the number of fingers you have on each hand.

Like the iPhone, the device also employs capacitive-touch technology. A finger touching a sensor grid (just below the screen) causes a change in signal. That relays exactly where on the screen the finger is. While the iPhone uses a solid solution known as ITO (indium tin oxide), Moto employs a grid of super-thin wires that pick up on the signals from each finger.

The thin-wire grid is used currently in single-touch displays, but has yet to be used in multitouch displays, and that's where Moto's work on the inner electronics and the software to take advantage of multitouch comes in.

There are many more high-profile efforts in this area under way. Moto is set to try and compete with the likes of Microsoft's Surface technology and Perceptive Pixel's large-scale screens, like the one made famous during CNN's 2008 US presidential election coverage. Epson recently showed off its X-Desk Surface-like technology.

Photo credit: Moto Development Group