I am a big fan of the idea of living in a world where interaction with computers are done beyond the traditional computer keyboard and mouse. There is a clear move towards a touch interface and a recent debate with a good friend of mine regarding the impact of this put me on the verge of another bet on technology. Will touch become dominant or will it not? I am of the opinion that it will do so within the next decade if not the next five years. For personal computing touch technology has always been an expensive exercise. It has mainly been restricted to retail point of sales screens and the displays of the wealthy until it relatively recently found its way onto smart phones. Why it transitioned to smart-phones before larger computing devices I don’t know but a safe guess would be cost considerations.

The general consumer or shall we refer to ourselves as average consumers will now have the opportunity to buy into touch technology be it still for mobile devices like tablet computers. The new operating systems like Windows 7 already support touch technology and all you really have to do to get your computer on your desktop going with touch is a touch enabled screen. The driving force for touch will however primarily come from the mobile devices. What would be the benefit though, especially if you are going to use a device without a dedicated keyboard?

Personally I think we need to rethink screen size, especially for desktop environments if touch is truly going to take off. Or at least replace the keyboard with a touch device. If you want to ditch the keyboard you will currently have to sacrifice screen real estate to type what you want and then tuck the virtual keyboard away. That makes document editing a bit of a hangup and no self respecting editor of whatever professional or amateur level will dump their keyboard in such conditions. I would opt for having the touch screen replacement on my desk, but also replacing the keyboard with another touch screen device that give me keyboard functionality off screen when needed but also other more modern input options like advanced touch based game controls. Imagine how cool games will become if those game controls now manifested themselves in a super modern way on your touch panel that replaced the keyboard but kept your screen real estate intact?

We can also make screens larger in hight in order to make space for a screen based keyboard without affecting the view of documents while editing for instance. It just does not make sense for me. On a mobile phone it is a similar story but the use is different. Very few people actively edit large documents on mobile phones. They may read them, but I doubt they create them there apart from perhaps in emergencies.

In short for mobile use, touch is awesome and it will revolutionize the way we interact with computers but to take the jump effectively to the desktop will take some lateral thinking. The keyboard and mouse is however up for replacement and whoever has got the capital can make a ton of money if they do it right. The holy grail however will be voice, which is still a hit and miss effort at the moment. But touch will remain for those moments where you cannot speak aloud or want to keep your writings private. So this will be an important step in the evolution of human computer interaction. Unless we can get the telepathic input right…