Comment by zeroonetwothree
2 years ago
It allows manipulations that are impossible with single touch (like a mouse). It’s pretty big for things like 3D manipulation.
2 years ago
It allows manipulations that are impossible with single touch (like a mouse). It’s pretty big for things like 3D manipulation.
You can do all of those multi-touch manipulations on a Macintosh trackpad (zoom, pan, rotate, scale, etc). However, that trackpad would still be categorized as a form of a mouse -- correctly, in my opinion.
All of these gestures can be (and are, given that 3D modeling is historically done on desktop) handled with a standard mouse using a combination of the scroll wheel and modifier keys.
Whether it's your fingers or an on-screen pointer, it's the same paradigm in the sense of it being the same model of interaction. You move a pointer around and activate controls on the screen by touching them. I'm not knocking gestural controls, just saying if I had to classify them, I'd say they're an evolution of the mouse or touchpad rather than a whole new model.
And they aren't an evolution in all aspects, either. Multi-touch controls are easier for some things, harder for others. Fine-grain manipulation, for example selecting cells on a spreadsheet, or playing an FPS video game, are harder with touch controls than with a device like a mouse. They've also got a size constraint (the size of your fingertip) that makes many interfaces harder to use.