Multi-touch usability “study” with 3-year-old

IMG_3267 I’m participating in BizSparkCamp called “Building modern Windows 7 application” here in Croatia as one of the tutors. One of the key modern features in Windows 7 is multi-touch support and I’ve been playing with a multi-touch monitor (Dell SX2210T) for a week now. It’s quite fun, especially with Windows 7 Touch Pack released as a free download last month.

Over the weekend, I have put my 3-year-old daughter in front of it and observed her reactions. She had a lot of fun, especially in Paint. From my point of view, the most interesting part of this little experiment was in Microsoft Surface Collage application – I told here to zoom the photo, and she instinctively took two fingers and did the pinch move. I was really surprised, since I’m pretty sure she didn’t see me or anybody else doing it, not even on phones. Seems that the pinch is more natural than I thought.

If you have a multi-touch device, check out this list of applications. There is a multi-touch support in Silverlight as well and developing Windows Phone 7 apps with no actual device is much simpler with this monitor.

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