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The Ultimate Dual-Hand Touchscreen
LithiumX writes "This morning I saw a
video demonstration of the most interesting input technology I've seen for a long time. This is a touch-screen that accepts inputs from multiple (I saw at least 8) points at once. It seems very responsive, the display is large and of decent resolution, and they actually wrote software to take advantage of it.
It appears to be entirely research
at the moment. I'd offer up organs for one of these things."
Which in turn look a lot like Apple recycling their iPod scrollwheel and Synaptics double-finger gestures.
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
The satellite imagery & topographic maps are the user navigating NASA World Wind. Way cool.
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The Exploratorium in San Francisco had a multi-point touch screen paint system like this in the early 90's, which anyone could play with. It was really great, and quite elegant! It was running a fun program that let you paint with your fingertips, real paintbrushes dipped in water, as well as textured objects like a sponge and play-dough. It used an oblique video camera behind a plate of glass, and your fingers or the wet brush changed the index of refraction in a way that would show up brightly on the camera, and thus paint on the screen. There was no limit to the number of points you could paint at once, and what you could use as a brush was only limited by your imagination and what you could get away with in public: you could paint with brushes, sponges, clay, your fingertips, the palms of both hands, your face, your tongue, your boobs, greasy french fries and hamburger patties, or vomit on the screen to make interesting textures. (It's a good thing the Exploratorium makes everything robust, kid-proof, and easy to clean! I've been to some great parties at that place...)
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
They didnt write all their own software, they used NASA World Wind (http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/ as well (satellite / aerial imagery viewer).
While applications like this have been around before, most of the time they still had to be controlled with a special hardware-device: And it's very cool to see they now succeeded in bringing it to only be controlled by the fingers.
What's special is that it can sense more than one point of contact at once. In fact not just "more than one" but "any number of" points of contact in parallel. It's a totally different ball game than standard touch screens. A typical touch screen only reports one X,Y position at a time (like a mouse), which is typically the average of the points of contact (depending on the pressure, and the type of touch screen of course).
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
"I'd offer up organs for one of these things."
/., we all know which organ should be first to go, seeing as how it's the least used.
This being
In C++, friends can touch each others private parts.
I appreciate that touch screens are faster to use in some situations compared to a mouse, and in some situations (public access terminals in a cinema etc.) they are better but for the average consumer are touch screens necessary. Most people out there have been brought up with the mouse and are very adapt at using it. Other than the coolness factor (akin to having the fastest graphics card available to play doom3 at 200fps) is there a real market/need for touch screens for general consumers? Especially comparing the price of a mouse/LCD monitor vs touch screen?
I'd offer up organs for one of these things
Me too, just not mine.
Ba-Bing!
That's an incredible technology. If it works as demonstrated, I can see it replacing the mouse. If we can get useful keyboards in there (sorry, software-based on-screen keyboards suck, they lack tactile feedback) as well, this could open up a whole new way in which to interact.
See, a lot of buttons on the mouse and on the screen are merely to differentiate between different actions, e.g. resize, fullscreen or close a window. More logical and intuitive options are possible with multitouch technology, e.g. as shown in the demos.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Just as keyboard driven applications had to be rewritten to accept input from mice. Horribly traumatic, wasn't it?
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Entirely different - it's based on something called 'frustrated internal reflection'. Simple version: you have a thin slab of transparent perspex with LEDs around the sides. The light from the LEDs is kept inside thanks to total internal reflection - it's a bit like a big flat piece of fibre optic cable in a sense.
When you place a finger or other appendage on the upper surface of the perspex, the total internal reflection breaks down and the fingertip (or whatever) gets illuminated - you track this with a camera pointing upwards at the perspex. To get the computer display gubbins, you also have a video projector pointing at the perspex.
I'm not sure how amenable it is to miniaturisation, but since it's used in fingerprint readers (without the video display) it's probably not too bad - presumably you'd have to change the projector and camera to flat equivalents, of course...
(Something I noticed on the page last week - a reference to work on identifying which finger is touching the display. He's updated that sentence to "Wouldn't it also be nice to identify which finger (e.g. thumb, index, etc.) is associated with each contact?" - but I'd had a sudden vision of this thing using fingerprints as, well, unique finger identification tags. The guy behind it seems pretty big on computer vision, and is also working on stuff like a "new generation of CMOS imaging sensors that feature on-board signal processing functionality, we are experimenting with creating a 1000fps non-invasive eye-tracker for under $100" - maybe some custom hardware for tracking and zooming in on the glowing fingerprints and identifying the fingers from there?)
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FWIW, you can buy something like this right now. The Lemur is a touch screen that supports multiple touch-points at once, and communicates over Ethernet via OpenSoundControl. I have one on my desk at work, and it works well -- e.g. I can use 5 fingers to drag 5 different balls around the Lemur's touch-screen simultaneously, and see my actions mirrored instantaneously on the software on my PC.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
http://madmappers.freeearthfoundation.com/multitou chreel.mpg
:D
For all you mad slashdot clickers
The difference is you could *totally* take down a Gibson with one of these puppies.
I ain't evil, I'm just good looking.
After the initial "Oooooh, shiny! I'll give a kidney for one!" impulse, this reminds me quite a bit of the spiffy user interface in Minority Report, probably because of the intense arms-waving involved. So, makes me think the same too: very cool to see, but highly impractical. Your arms and shoulders would get painfully tired after just a few minutes using this...
;-)
So, I'll be keeping my kidney this time, thank you very much. I'll just go grab a box of tissues and watch the video again...
I code, therefore I am.
Here's a description of Myron Krueger's classic Videodesk system, from Jakob Nielson's CHI'88 Trip Report (in which he also described our presentation of pie menus).
-Don
Videodesk: Computing on the Desktop
Current marketing trends in the personal computer business emphasize "desktop this" and "desktop that" - desktop publishing, desktop presentations, desktop video, desktop CAD... as a catch phrase for doing things on small, desktop computers. It is also possible, however, to actually do computing on the desktop itself. This was demonstrated by Myron Krueger from the Artificial Reality Corporation in the Videodesk system: Videodesk consists of a large surface over which you move your arms, hands, and fingers. A video camera mounted over the desk picks up these movements and use them as input to the computer which then shows then as an outline on the display. This display is currently separate from the desktop surface but one might imagine that a future system would feel even more natural to the user by having the output display projected directly onto the input surface.
Several applications were shown. One of the most immediately understandable was a finger painting system where the color used was determined by the number of fingers shown. I asked Krueger why the system deposited the paint over the user's finger rather than under it which might have seemed more natural. His answer was that sometimes one would not want the hand to obscure the work being drawn.
The painting was cleared by spreading all fingers. Some of these gestures seemed very natural, including the clearing gesture. Gestures in other applications were not that obvious but still frequently very nice, such as having a straight line appear between two fingertips in a CAD-system. One problem they had in developing their gestural language was in parsing hand movements to determine when you just want to move your hand to another part of the screen and when you want to issue a command. In general, there seemed not to be much consistency in the interaction techniques used in the different parts of the system with the exception of the technique of reaching to the upper right corner of the screen to pull out the main menu.
Videodesk is really a special version of the older Videoplace system where the computer is an entire room which you enter to use your body as input device. As such, Videodesk was yet another example of the evolutionary trend at this CHI. The full Videoplace system was not available for the conference as it was installed as part of a large exhibit on Computers and Art at the IBM Building in New York. This was a very interesting exhibition which I had seen by accident before coming to Washington: I had originally jumped on the M2 bus to go uptown to the Metropolitan Museum when I looked out the window and saw a poster at the IBM Building for their special exhibition. Yet another advantage of not using a constrained "transport interface" like the subway: You can change your mind.
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Let me spell it out:
Major technological innovations in computers and the Internet have been driven by porn. Adoption rates are, among most early adopters, driven by that technology's ability to deliver porn. This is true of Broadband, the early graphics card races, DVD drives and the Internet itself.
This interface requires two hands.
Need I say more?
Don't make me to spell it out in anatomical detail.
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I'd give my left hand for a two-handed touch screen. ;-)
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One step closer to LCARS! ;)
I want the Minority Report style wall. I did a user interface experiment using the virtual whiteboards at my college: Which was more intuitive for arranging data. Up/Down buttons in a list, drag and drop with mouse, or drag and drop on a 'real' surface. Guess which won?
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
Ted Selker invented the "joy button" red keyboard cursor control thingie, and developed the "Trackpoint" at IBM's User Ergonomics Research Lab. (Anybody remember the "So Hot We Had to Make it Red" two page Thinkpad ad?)
At one of the New Paridigms for Using Computers conferences, he demonstrated a custom Thinkpad he'd modified to support two Trackpoints at once! It was an inexplicably attractive and approachable interface: operating the computer by tweaking two red nipples! Unfortunately the keyboard was not drool-proof.
He demonstrated another cool custom keyboard job with a piezoelectric buzzer under the Trackpoint, that gave tactile feedback as the cursor moved across textured surfaces and over edges.
He also made conference badges that clip onto a Trackpoint to measure physical motion and position -- it's so sensitive it can be used as a postage scale, wind speed sensor, seismograph and accelerometer.
Unfortunately none of those cool weird technologies made it into production. They require special APIs and deep modification of the desktop user interface and applications, in order to meaningfully exploit the special hardware. Take a look at the DirectX force feedback API that eventually came along, for example -- it's quite complex, and not many applications support it. Applications would have to know about the special hardware and go out of their way to support it, which just won't happen soon, because current user interfaces and applications are extremely inflexible, and have brittle, device-dependent user interfaces.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Good points. It always did amaze me how their computers had such advanced AI, but I suppose it was just mere telepathy with the user that made them so prescient.
Minor clarification of little note: The computer I mentioned from The Island would actually not give gorilla arm. It was essentially a table, with the user's hands resting horizontally on the surface or downwards if used while standing. Basically it was like a PC-less standard office desk, only nothing on it was physical but rather images on the desk surface.