Microsoft Envisions A Future With Super-Fast Touchscreens
As solid as modern touchscreens are, there's very often an subtly apparent sense of disconnect when you try to use one. According to Paul Dietz of Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group, it all comes down to latency …
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group has spent two years arguing that the screen itself should disappear into the interface: the group showed off a shape-shifting touchscreen back in November 2010, and in January 2011 Microsoft framed an explicit natural-user-interface future on its official blog. With Paul Dietz now naming latency — not resolution or capacitive sensitivity — as the source of the subtle disconnect users feel, the lab is pointing at a measurable engineering target rather than another novel form factor.
The pitch lands at a charged moment for Microsoft: February 2012 analysis already framed Windows 8 as the release on which the company's relevance hinges, given that the PC-centric world that made Windows ubiquitous has changed, and the Nokia partnership is betting on a 'unique' touch-first phone experience. The story's unusually wide pickup — Engadget, Forbes, LAPTOP Magazine, Geek.com and others all carried it within days — suggests the press reads this research as groundwork for exactly that touch-heavy product cycle.
First-order effects
- Dietz's framing gives Microsoft's own hardware and software teams — and by extension its Windows 8 OEM partners — a concrete specification to chase: touch latency low enough that the disconnect vanishes, making panel and digitizer speed a visible differentiator in the upcoming Windows 8 device wave.
- For the Applied Sciences Group itself, the latency thesis reframes its portfolio around responsiveness, complementing earlier work like the 2010 shape-shifting display rather than competing with it.
Second-order effects
- If low-latency touch becomes the marketing yardstick for Windows 8 hardware, PC makers will lean on display and digitizer suppliers for faster sensing stacks, shifting component-level competition toward refresh and response times rather than pixel counts.
- Rival platforms with established touch ecosystems face pressure to match or explain away any perceptible latency gap, since Dietz's argument implies current screens across the industry share the same flaw.
Third-order effects
- The longer arc here, consistent with the group's trajectory since 2010, is that input quality — not just apps or form factor — becomes a structural axis of competition between computing platforms, with labs like Microsoft's setting targets that consumer hardware eventually has to meet.
- Should latency drop below the threshold of perception, the boundary between touching a screen and manipulating a physical object blurs further, strengthening the case for the surface-and-object interfaces Microsoft is separately prototyping, such as Illumishare's remote sharing of physical and digital items.
The trend: Microsoft is methodically attacking each sensory gap between touchscreens and physical objects — first shape, now latency — as part of a multi-year Applied Sciences Group push to make natural user interfaces the default.