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In computing, multi-touch is technology that enables a surface (a trackpad or touchscreen) to recognize the presence of more than one〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Multi-touch definition of Multi-touch in the Free Online Encyclopedia. )〕〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Glossary - X2 Computing )〕 or more than two points of contact with the surface. This plural-point awareness may be used to implement additional functionality, such as pinch to zoom or to activate certain subroutines attached to predefined gestures. The 2 different uses of the term are the result of the quick developments in this field, which resulted in many companies using the term "multi-touch" for marketing purposes for older technology that is called ''gesture-enhanced single-touch'' or several other terms by other companies and researchers.〔(【引用サイトリンク】 url = http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/TouchTopics/Home/Terminology/WhatIsMultitouch/ )〕 There are several other similar or related terms that attempt to differentiate between whether a device can exactly determine or only approximate the location of different points of contact and that attempt to further differentiate between the various technological capabilities,〔 but they are often used as synonyms in marketing. ==History of multi-touch== The use of touchscreen technology to control electronic devices pre-dates multi-touch technology and the personal computer. Early synthesizer and electronic instrument builders like Hugh Le Caine and Robert Moog experimented with using touch-sensitive capacitance sensors to control the sounds made by their instruments.〔Buxton, Bill. ("Multitouch Overview" )〕 IBM began building the first touch screens in the late 1960s, and, in 1972, Control Data released the PLATO IV computer, a terminal used for educational purposes that employed single-touch points in a 16x16 array as its user interface. Prior to Multi-touch technology it was very difficult to manufacture a touch screen device without a pen interface. The idea of being able to use a keyboard interface built into the actual touch screen itself, which we see today, was impossible to attain because the screens were only able to utilize these single-touch points. One of the early implementations of mutual capacitance touchscreen technology was developed at CERN in 1977 based on their capacitance touch screens developed in 1972 by Danish electronics engineer Bent Stumpe. This technology was used to develop a new type of human machine interface (HMI) for the control room of the Super Proton Synchrotron particle accelerator. In a handwritten note dated 11 March 1972, Stumpe presented his proposed solution – a capacitive touch screen with a fixed number of programmable buttons presented on a display. The screen was to consist of a set of capacitors etched into a film of copper on a sheet of glass, each capacitor being constructed so that a nearby flat conductor, such as the surface of a finger, would increase the capacitance by a significant amount. The capacitors were to consist of fine lines etched in copper on a sheet of glass – fine enough (80 μm) and sufficiently far apart (80 μm) to be invisible (CERN Courier April 1974 p117).In the final device, a simple lacquer coating prevented the fingers from actually touching the capacitors. Multi-touch technology substantially began in 1982, when the University of Toronto's Input Research Group developed the first human-input multi-touch system,〔Mehta, Nimish (1982), A Flexible Machine Interface, M.A.Sc. Thesis, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Toronto supervised by Professor K.C. Smith.〕 although an earlier system switch-matrix touch screen from M.I.T. was also capable of multi-touch detection.〔Kaplow, Roy and Molnar, Michael (1976), A computer-terminal, hardware/software system with enhanced user input capabilities; the enhanced-input terminal system (EITS), ACM SIGGRAPH, Vol 10 No 2, Summer 1976, pp. 116-124; US Patent 4,202,041, "Dynamically Variable Keyboard System", May 6, 1980〕 The system at the University of Toronto used a frosted-glass panel with a camera placed behind the glass. When a finger or several fingers pressed on the glass, the camera would detect the action as one or more black spots on an otherwise white background, allowing it to be registered as an input. Since the size of a dot was dependent on pressure (how hard the person was pressing on the glass), the system was somewhat pressure-sensitive as well.〔 In 1983, Bell Labs at Murray Hill published a comprehensive discussion of touch-screen based interfaces.〔 〕 In 1983 the video-based Video Place/Video Desk system of Myron Krueger was influential in development of multi-touch gestures such as pinch-to-zoom.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Videoplace '88 )〕〔Krueger, Myron, W., Gionfriddo, Thomas., &Hinrichsen, Katrin (1985). VIDEOPLACE - An Artificial Reality, Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’85), 35 - 40.〕 In 1984, Bell Labs engineered a touch screen that could change images with more than one hand. In 1985, the University of Toronto group including Bill Buxton developed a multi-touch tablet that used capacitance rather than bulky camera-based optical sensing systems.〔 Sears et al. (1990)〔Sears, A., Plaisant, C., Shneiderman, B. (June 1990) A new era for high-precision touchscreens. Advances in Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 3, Hartson, R. & Hix, D. Eds., Ablex (1992) 1-33 HCIL-90-01, CS-TR-2487, CAR-TR-506. ()〕 gave a review of academic research on single and multi-touch touchscreen human–computer interaction of the time, describing single touch gestures such as rotating knobs, swiping the screen to activate a switch (or a U-shaped gesture for a toggle switch), and touchscreen keyboards (including a study that showed that users could type at 25 words per minute for a touchscreen keyboard compared with 58 words per minute for a standard keyboard, with multi-touch hypothesized to improve data entry rate); multi-touch gestures such as selecting a range of a line, connecting objects, and a "tap-click" gesture to select while maintaining location with another finger are also described. An advance occurred in 1991, when Pierre Wellner published a paper on his multi-touch "Digital Desk", which supported multi-finger and pinching motions.〔Wellner, Pierre. 1991. The Digital Desk. 〕〔(Pierre Wellner's papers ) via DBLP〕 Various companies expanded upon these inventions in the beginning of the twenty-first century. The company Fingerworks developed various multi-touch technologies between 1999 and 2005, including Touchstream keyboards and the iGesture Pad. Several studies of this technology were published in the early 2000s by Alan Hedge, professor of human factors and ergonomics at Cornell University.〔Westerman, W., Elias J.G. and A.Hedge (2001) Multi-touch: a new tactile 2-d gesture interface for human-computer interaction Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 45th Annual Meeting, Vol. 1, 632-636.〕〔Shanis, J. and Hedge, A. (2003) Comparison of mouse, touchpad and multitouch input technologies. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 47th Annual Meeting, Oct. 13–17, Denver, CO, 746-750.〕〔Thom-Santelli, J. and Hedge, A. (2005) Effects of a multitouch keyboard on wrist posture, typing performance and comfort. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 49th Annual Meeting, Orlando, Sept. 26-30, HFES, Santa Monica, 646-650.〕 Apple acquired Fingerworks and its multi-touch technology in 2005. Mainstream exposure to multi-touch technology occurred in 2007 when the iPhone gained popularity, with Apple stating they "invented multi touch" as part of the iPhone announcement, however both the function and the term predate the announcement or patent requests, except for such area of application as capacitive mobile screens, which did not exist before Fingerworks/Apple's technology (Fingerworks filed patents in 2001–2005, subsequent multi-touch refinements were patented by Apple〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Touch Screen Device, Method, and Graphical User Interface for Determining Commands by Applying Heuristics )〕). Microsoft's table-top touch platform, Microsoft PixelSense, which started development in 2001, interacts with both the user's touch and their electronic devices. Similarly, in 2001, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) began development of a multi-touch, multi-user system called DiamondTouch, also based on capacitance, but able to differentiate between multiple simultaneous users (or rather, the chairs in which each user is seated or the floorpad on which the user is standing); the Diamondtouch became a commercial product in 2008. In May 2015, Apple was granted a patent for a "fusion keyboard", which turns individual physical keys into multi-touch buttons.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2484677,00.asp )〕 Small-scale touch devices are rapidly becoming commonplace, with the number of touch screen telephones expected to increase from 200,000 shipped in 2006 to 21 million in 2012.〔Wong, May. 2008. Touch-screen phones poised for growth (http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2007-06-21-1895245927_x.htm ). Retrieved April 2008.〕 Some of the first devices to support multi-touch were: *Mitsubishi DiamondTouch (2001) *Apple iPhone (announced January 9, 2007) *Microsoft PixelSense (formerly Surface) (May 29, 2007) *NORTD labs Open Source system CUBIT (multi-touch) (2007) *ELAN eFinger 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Multi-touch」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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