There is a scene in the film Minority Report in which Tom Cruise stands in front of a vast Perspex-like screen housed in the police department’s Pre-Crime Unit. He gazes in earnest at the transparent surface, waving his hands across the tablet to swirl great chunks of text and moving images across the screen to form a storyboard of yet-to-be-committed crimes. With a simple twist of his finger or a flick of his wrist, pictures expand and enlarge, words scroll, and whole trains of thought come to tangible fruition right there on the board. The year is 2054.

Yet, it seems the era of true touch-screen technology is much closer than that.

Indeed, when Apple boss Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in San Francisco earlier this year, he grandly declared: “We’re re-inventing the cell phone.” One of the main reasons for Jobs’ bold claim was the iPhone’s futuristic user interface — “multi-touch”. As demonstrated on stage by Jobs himself, multi-touch was created to make the most of the iPhone’s large screen. Unlike most existing smart phones, the iPhone has only one conventional button — all the rest of the controls appear on screen, adapting and morphing around your fingertips as you use the device, rather like the giant tablet in Minority Report.

The demonstration iPhone handset certainly looked like re-invention, but multi-touch, while new for Apple, is by no means a new technology. The concept has been around for years, waiting for the hardware side of the equation to get small enough, smart enough and cheap enough to make it a reality. While it remains something of a novelty now, there’s a good chance that the coming years will bring many more computers and consumer gadgets that depend wholly or partly on multi-touch concepts.

The basic premise of multi-touch is simple; instead of dragging and clicking icons and objects on screen using a device such as a mouse, you touch the screen with your fingers. In some cases, the surface you’re touching is pressure-sensitive, so pressing harder performs an additional function. You might tap a file gently just to select it, or push it a bit harder to edit it. The “multi” part of the name is important: a traditional mouse interface allows you to interact with only one point on the screen at a time; multi-touch lets you use your hands the way nature designed them, pointing and moving and manipulating things with several fingers at once.

Bill Buxton is a world expert on multi-touch technology, which was first pioneered by Nimish Mehta at the University of Toronto in 1982. Buxton’s team began working on early versions of the multi-touch interface back in 1984, the year Apple released its first Macintosh computer. Since then, research has been almost non-stop, and the first really dramatic advances were made as early as the 1990s. In 1992, IBM and Bell South released the Simon mobile phone, a device remarkably like today’s iPhone, which had a large touch-screen interface.

Buxton describes his still-working Simon as “one of the most prized pieces” in his collection. It paved the way for a trial by Mitsubishi in 2001: the group developed Diamond Touch, a system designed to let a group of people collaborate on projects by sitting at an interactive table. Using specially designed chairs that measured tiny electric currents moving through each person’s body, the system allowed every person present to control objects on the table’s touch-screen surface.

Buxton, employed by Microsoft’s research laboratories, describes the difference between single-touch systems (like the graphics tablets and touch pads we use today) and multi-touch: “If you can manipulate only one point, regardless if it’s a mouse, touch screen, joystick, or trackball, you are restricted to the gestural vocabulary of a fruit fly. We were given multiple limbs for a reason. It's nice to be able to take advantage of them.”

If multi-touch takes off, the good old-fashioned mouse that we’ve all spent the past 20 years learning to use could become redundant. Although, as Buxton points out, “the mouse is great for many things. Just not everything.”

A simple example is navigating a large image using multi-touch. To zoom in and see it in more detail, you might use a “pinch” gesture with your thumb and forefinger.

Start by grabbing the area you want to zoom in on with both, then gently move them apart and the image expands, following your fingers.

Apple’s iPhone lets users “flick” through their address book, as though it were a physical object. Names scroll by like the dials on a fruit machine. Pausing the scroll just needs a touch; the roll of names can be moved further by gently dragging a finger up or down.

So is multi-touch the future of computing? Buxton is keen to point out the potential problems with touch-screen devices. Fingers are good for some tasks; for others, you’re better off with a stylus. Fingers can also get in the way, with your hand obscuring part of the screen. And a touch-screen mobile device still needs two hands — one to hold it, the other to touch. Even so, multi-touch still has great potential. “It took 30 years for the mouse to go from laboratory experiment to consumer device,” he says. “By that measure, multi-touch still has another five years to go before it falls behind.”

Multi-touch is still young, but that’s an advantage. Apple’s iPhone is just the beginning. For the current generation of computer users it will always seem like a new idea, perhaps quite tricky to get to grips with. But for today’s toddlers, it will be as natural as using a mouse is to us.