If Apple’s Working on a Tablet PC, Here’s Video of What the Interface Should Look Like

There’s talk over at ThinkSecret that the next video iPod may feature a big screen covering the entire front of the device. The screen will be touch-sensitive, allowing the iPod to be controlled by a virtual click wheel that will appear when a finger brushes the screen.

Apple was recently granted several touch-screen patents. The filings (here, here and here) include illustrations of a hand making circular motions as if it were using an iPod clickwheel.

But the patents may also refer to a tablet PC. They mention rotating and centering pages, zooming in and out of documents — and recognizing complex gestures from multiple touch points on the screen — all of which sounds like a multipoint gesture interface developed at NYU.

In New York, researchers have created a working prototype of an amazing touch-screen interface for a computer that, unlike most touch screens, supports multiple touch points — or multiple people.

Running on OS X, the interface is reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s fictional, gesture-based UI in Minority Report — but much cooler.

In a demonstration video (You Tube link), a user can be seen rearranging digital pictures scattered across a virtual desktop, and resizing them by squeezing their fingers together or splaying them apart. The user also creates some digital art, zooms in on a map and scoots around, and types rapidly on a virtual keyboard.

I’m not a tablet expert, but all the tablet PCs I’ve seen present a standard UI with some gesture controls, substituting the mouse cursor for a greasy finger.

The NYU research seems like a radical rethink — a real haptic interface, appropriate to hand control.

There’s been lots of rumors of an Apple tablet lately. If it has this kind of interface — it’d be a killer.

(Via Robot Wisdom)