An emerging trend of GIS interaction development: Multi-touch GIS

Multi-touch technology creates a new era of human-computer interaction. Its combination with GIS can help common GIS overcome some defects, and then achieve more humanized multi-touch GIS. With the gradual popularization of multi-touch devices, multi-touch GIS will come to be the mainstream in the future. In order to analyze the structure of multi-touch GIS, and explore its design methods, after learning of research achievements in related domain, including some multi-touch GIS software, this paper firstly put forward some defects of common GIS caused by traditional hardware and interaction pattern, then analyzed the main characteristics of multi-touch GIS, and then, studied the basic framework and the products of multi-touch GIS currently, at last, explored and put forward some helpful design methods and principles of multi-touch GIS from the aspects of user interface, hand gestures, data organization and visualization.