posibility of multitouch on universal or similar htc phones

[djboo]

before we go any further, id like to point out im not a complete luddite and ive thought about this a fair bit before posting...

looking at the iphone vids, i notice that multi touch pretty much means dual touch. i expect their technology allows for more than two fingers, but the space and OS dont really allow for this.

in playing with my univ, i notice it does some kind of averaging between to fingers - so possibly at a low level u could get multi-touch - but logic says if this is possible, sure it would have been done by now.

my logic also says this:

if u get a second touch screen plate (i beleive that the touch screen element is a layer over the screen - if this isnt true, my logic is flawed) and install it over the top of the current screen - but rotated 180 degrees, and there is the provisioning for a second touch screen input (probably unlikely but surely u could hijack something else such as the serial used for irda) then if you can read the top left touch of each screen, u should have fairly accurate multi touch, good enough for the cheesy 'grab photo and resize by stretching'

am i totally wrong here? is there any point looking further into this?

ps. in writing this, it also occurs to me that the iphones biggest use of this is the photos - which are always in the same place, scaled on correct aspect ratio etc - theres no need for two fingers - u could just grab one corner to stretch it and itd be a very similar efect

[AlanJC]

Nope, sorry.

[djboo]

Dear Alan,

I thank you for your insightful reply. I feel you have bettered the forum and the community as a whole with your intelligent wit and your interesting and thought inducing contradictions to the theories that i presented.

Without your thoughts I may have been tempted to push these ideas further, maybe even get out a soldering iron and a copy of visual studio, but I can clearly see that I am mistaken in where this project could go and will not further waste my time.

I must thank you kind sir, for your thought and advice. You are a squire and a gentleman.

[vijay555]

Lol :)

I don't think DIY hardware upgrades have ever made it far - consider the viability of GPS on the Hermes - it does require one to pop out a soldering iron to play with the idea. So your market is already down to a fraction of a %.

But I'm sure you could wire up a bluetooth or even IRDA multitouch capacitance layer... However, from a theoretical point of view - is it worth it? I considered the idea, and the Universal/Athena might make sense with your bigger screen, but on your average Hermes, I can barely get two fingers on the screen without obscurring most of it.

Like momentum based scrolling, I think multitouch on such a small screen is kinda gimicky - as you said, it's easier to write logic to pin one corner, free rotate with a finger on the other corner, enlarge, zoom etc. Ie ergonomic single touch.
Multitouch, even if possible on HTCs, barely seems to have a practical milieu IMHO on devices with screens <= 3 inches.

V

[SecureGSM]

ps. in writing this, it also occurs to me that the iphones biggest use of this is the photos - which are always in the same place, scaled on correct aspect ratio etc - theres no need for two fingers - u could just grab one corner to stretch it and itd be a very similar efect

I am totally agree with you. and there are some other relatively simple solutions that can be used to simulate "multi touch actions" on photos.

for an instance,

D-PAD can be used for photos enlargement:

press both "left" and "right" - scales photos up
press both "up" and "down" - scales photos down

or other way around, etc.
this one not so difficult to implement.

also, it is quite easy to emulate multi-touch action on single touch display itself.
How? if we have applied layer consisted from interleaved pressure sensitive and non-sensitive spots, then having two fingers moved in opposite directions accros this layer will likely create sequence of pressed spots that can be easily analysed and interpreted in guesture.

my understanding is that while your left finger is moving to the left and crossing pressure non-sensitive spot, there is a good chance that your right finger at the same time will be crossing presure sensitive spot and moving to the right. this creates easy to analyze patern.


I believe that logic behind this idea is simple to primitive and guaranteed to work. "public domain" 20.06.2007. :)

[djboo]

are there any existing apps to get the raw output from the touchscreen (ive got nothing against coding my own, but no need to re-invent the wheel if it already exists)

the more i play with the univ and more than one finger, the more that it almost seems like its multi touch dumbed down to single touch. the averaging it does is rather uncanny and im sure if we can see whats happening before the os gets a look in we can work something out