OFFF Report: Multi-Touch Barcelona Share A Journey Of Discovery

The four young Catalans behind the experimental technology design group Multi-Touch came across at OFFF as the boy-band of media arts. In a darkened hangar before an audience of hundreds, the team presented the work they had achieved since they had come together just over a year ago – and explained how their view of human interaction design evolved over that time. While at a glance their work may look quite primitive compared to the hyper-graphic power of the Microsoft Surface sitting outside the room they talked in, their understanding of the importance of human to human interaction made the showpiece in the hall look quite unnecessary.

They started their talk with a very recent video called Human Interface where they filmed one of the team trapped in a box completing in analog form the tasks of his digital masters. Charlie from Multi Touch said:

We do this project to communicate that we don’t just do multi-touch but that we want to make technology closer to people.

Paul added that they started to use the sub-title “Natural Interaction Project” after they felt hounded by companies who wanted them to make large touch screen applications for them. He showed an image of their office early in the morning (sorry this one is rather blurred) and said that it summed up the aim of their work – warm up technology.

We believe that technology has gone far from humans so we try to bring it closer and add to it some human features that make it warmer and the user happier. When we started we knew that people gained experience through their senses. We thought that we could enter through these senses and trigger emotions.

At this point the group showed their Multi-Touch Crayon work

Building Multi-Touch Crayon was so simple Paul old the audience. The programing was the easy part. It was all about making it fun to play with:

But as we built it we changed our minds – we started thinking that what was more interesting about the reaction to our work was the relationship the users were developing as they were interacting with it. We decided to build interfaces as an excuse for people to meet and establish relationships with one another.

Of course social networks have been in this space for a while, Paul said, but they had trouble establishing real human relationships. He asked the audience how it felt to receive a Facebook hug and whether it was comparable to real hugs. He also criticized the use of Twitter and said that Twittering a moment may reduce the enjoyment time.

The arts group then showed their work for Guten Touch – a project they developed for the back-stage area for the Red Bull Music Academy in Barcelona in 2008. The video shows a Natural Paint system and their well known space invaders concept.

An interesting learning they found with Natural Paint was people’s need to erase. People would naturally use their forearm to erase the words and images they had painted earlier as part of the creative process.

With the Space Invaders concept they noticed the social interaction with balls. They set out to see how people would play by throwing balls at a huge screen with space invaders and they ended up watching how people started to organize themselves as they played. They created process – some would become the throwers, some would be the ball gatherers, some the passers-of-balls.

The Muliti-Touch team ended the talk by explaining that the original plan for Guten Touch was to make a number of applications that made people interact with the screens but after watching people for hours to see how they related to the screen they realized that the important part of interactive relationship was actually between people.

Multi-Touch Barcelona