Finger is not a mouse

Well you must have have guessed almost correctly on what I meant by the title of the post. With an onset of touchscreen devices and cheaper technology support (Ipad) we are going to see a rush of applications for the NEW genre of interaction. However we can argue that the interaction model was already there in terms of touchpad in laptop and wacom tablets. Only difference is now we'll be interacting with the content directly !
But wait a second. We will discover some gaps in the granularity of interaction model of mouse/pointer and finger touch.
Starting with basic question, and coders will get it quickly. What are different events that we code for a mouse?
mousemove - trapping the movement of mouse without click
mouseover - when mouse moves over an area of target object
mouseout - when mouse leaves the area of a target object
mousemove - trapping the movement of mouse with click
mouseclick/mousepress - when a target object is clicked by mouse mouserelease - when a mouse is released after clicking a target object

The reason of coloring the events differently is to make the interaction models in touch application and mouse supported application apparent. You can't have the first 3 interaction models in a touch application. You need to have a visible pointer all the time in the application that control those events. In touch application the pointer is activated only when you touch the surface, but that becomes your click event.
Hence the fundamental interaction model is violated. For certain application and websites first three are the core of interaction design. And if they were to be ported on a touch supporting software, they need to be completely redesigned.
And now just think of Adobe Flash support on Ipad/Iphone/Itouch. If tomorrow Ipad/Iphone/Itouch has Flash support and users open the site that uses the first three interaction mentioned above, they are going to go mad on why the site/application is not working. Do we then invest of designing and building those sites/applications again? That will be and expensive affair in terms of cost and effort.
As an Interaction Designer and a Flash Developer this comes as frustration to me to design and develop the same content for different devices. Well there seems to be a unique solution to this though.

Discovering ......

The multi touch feel

Ok so being an interaction designer you got to do things which makes people say "AHA" or "WOW"
No no it's really not like that. But that's the byproduct of whatever work we do. People are going to exclaim these words implicitly

Stealing some time out from their busy schedule few of the hole-diggers (well this is what we have started calling ourselves at IDC, it's an alias for Interaction Design students @IDC) have planned to make this DDS a big event by putting up some of the works which are going to take the eyes of the audience out from their head. I'm sounding too violent !?!?!.

There was one time during Techfest when even people from Computer Science and Electronics dept. of IIT were found numb looking at the applications designed and developed by Hole diggers.
If you remember I posted about in "Illumiletter" the gesture based input system for drawing and playing with letters. You can see the video here >>

And this time during DDS (Degree 44) we are going to strike back again with some jaw dropping works and experiments. Multitouch applications are in our focus now. We have been working hard on this to get it to work. Thanks to NUIGroup which provided open source files on building these applications and the product.