Multi-touch in control systems : Two case studies

Abstract: During the last thirty years the progress of multi-touch technology has been a hot topic of discussion. Despite this, it has not been deployed in anything more advanced than commercials, games and illustrations. We believe that the time has come for the technology to become a broader and more advanced field. It should even be feasible to introduce the multi-touch technology into important environments e.g. control rooms. Two project based case studies, involving multi-touch in different aspects, will be described and discussed respectively. The first case study discusses the introduction of a Microsoft Surface as a collaboration tool in a control room environment. A prototype was built and evaluated to see how well it could work in a stressful and complex area where collaboration between colleagues is vital. The second case study describes the development and possible deployment of a smaller multi-touch screen that would work as an extra input to the control system. Its purpose is to facilitate the navigation in a control system for the operators, thereby easing their cognitive load and making the control room a more comfortable working place. The research of the case studies was based on interviews with operators and developers. From the research result appliance methods and designs were developed, and prototypes were constructed out of the best ones. The prototypes were then analyzed and tested for later evaluation and discussion. To see, whether or not the new multi-touch prototypes would function well in a control system. The objective of this thesis is to attempt to introduce multi-touch technology in control systems