Rad Interface Lets You Play Touchscreen Like a Piano

We recently gushed over exciting advances in touchscreen technology, particularly one developed by N-trig, which is providing Microsoft with the interface for next year's release of Windows 7. You'll be able to perform the same gestures on it that made the iPhone famous, such as fingertip scrolling and pinching, only you'll be able to do them with both hands. Certainly sounds like the summit of screen engineering. Unless your name is R. Clayton Miller and you've developed a screen interface that will make Windows 7 look like Etch-a-Sketch.

Miller has analyzed such bedrock assumptions of computers as the mouse and the windowed desktop and found them seriously wanting. Utilizing the latest technological advances, he has created an approach so radically and refreshingly new that every time you place your hands on a screen from now on you'll think about Miller's 10/GUI. The "10" is for ten fingers. The "GUI" is for Graphical User Interface - the place where the user meets the road.

In Miller's words:

"Over a quarter-century ago, Xerox introduced the modern graphical user interface paradigm we today take for granted.That it has endured is a testament to the genius of its design. But the industry is now at a crossroads: New technologies promise higher-bandwidth interaction, but have yet to find a truly viable implementation.

10/GUI aims to bridge this gap by rethinking the desktop to leverage technology in an intuitive and powerful way.

The mouse and the windowed desktop are perhaps the two greatest innovations in the history of human-computer interaction. But like all innovations, they are best seen as part of a continuum rather than a terminus.

The mouse and the window led us out of the confines of the keyboard and the text prompt to the world of graphical and spatial possibility we enjoy today. But there's no reason to stop there."

Not only does Miller not stop there, he hurtles past today's screen technology like a stoned teenager running a stop sign.

View the video demo below, then visit the 10/GUI website.

Richard Curtis