Touch Screen Tech Comes of Age

pottercw writes "Good summary of today's touch-screen technologies on Computerworld — the obvious Apple iPhone and Microsoft Surface, plus projected touch screens (nothing for users to break), handheld devices that you control from the back (so your fingers don't obscure the screen), and of course giant multitouch walls a la Minority Report. Anyone got $100K?"

Comments

wanna bet?

[LiquidCoooled]

plus projected touch screens (nothing for users to break)

I bet you with one permanent marker and a determination I could write "First Post" on every displayed image on a projected touchscreen.

Re:wanna bet?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I really haven't seen a lot of that kind of vandalism. It seems like slashdotters are trying hard to find reasons when it wouldn't work when other display systems would have most of the same problems under the same circumstances.

Rejected!

[ZeroFactorial]

Geek Rejection Lines for Tomorrow:

HEY! I am NOT an iPhone!

$100k? Try $40!

[Roger W Moore]

I don't have $100k but I do have $40, a web browser and a basic knowledge of electronics. If you do too you might want to try this link.

Re:$100k? Try $40!

[fictionpuss]

Since when does a Wii cost $40?

It doesn't - from the linked article: "NOTE: For most of these projects, you don't need the Nintendo Wii console. You only need the Wii controller and a bluetooth connection."

Where are these "researchers?"

[hakubi]

Am I the only one that remembers the episode of "Beyond 2000" where there was a guy showing a CRT touch screen that could support three points of contact? This would have been somewhere in the range of 14-15 years ago. To say that putting this in a cellular phone is revolutionary like saying the same thing about VOIP. Sorry, it's evolutionary at best.

OpenTouch, touchLib, TouchAPI and Google

[Lord Satri]

For your curiosity, Google also has tentacules in touch screen technology through touchEarth. AFAIK, this is in Google's SoC and work is mostly open source related. (for the most interested in virtual globes touch screens, see this link)

JCL5M for the win.

[pcgabe]

Anyone got $100K?

Anyone who has watched Johnny Chung Lee's videos knows that you don't need $100k. You just need a wiimote and a little brainmuscle. ^_^

Re:JCL5M for the win.

[ehrichweiss]

Yes, they work pretty damn well though they have a few limitations depending on how you implement them. Mine uses/used velcro straps to hold it to the screen but I found that it was prone to slippage and I'd have to recalibrate several times per session. So then I "integrated" it by removing the actual touchscreen from its frame and then installing it under the bezel of my laptop; that didn't take long to do but it did take some engineering to anchor the touchscreen so it wouldn't slide under the bezel. As for brands, mine is a Keytec Magic Touch(www.magictouch.com) and you can find them for about $210-ish if you check out their resellers.

The driver that comes with it is alright but there are others available for free(and some for SERIOUS $$$) if you are willing to do some experimentation. I found that the original driver has some limitations that I don't care for in how it senses a touch-on/touch-off so I had to set the driver to "Move-only" and then used the keyboard(and a macro program called AutoIt) to control the mouse click aspect of it. I haven't yet tried but there seem to be some awesome Linux drivers for it that are much more configurable.

Hope that helps. Let me know if you need to know anything specific.

please....MS Surface is not touch

[Anonymous Coward]

"the obvious Apple iPhone and Microsoft Surface

Once again - MS Surface has nothing to do with touching. There are 7 cameras below the glass that track and feed movement. The glass is the point reference and is not configured to detect or relay any physical content. It's just a big ass table with old tech stuffed inside.

So many punsters read so many reviews of tech products and believe so much MS hype without paying attention to what they are reading. MS seems to rely on that, by the way, and what a business model that must be in detail :)

Re:please....MS Surface is not touch

[westlake]

Surface has nothing to do with touching. There are 7 cameras below the glass that track and feed movement. The glass is the point reference and is not configured to detect or relay any physical content. It's just a big ass table with old tech stuffed inside.

Surface can take the punishment of the game room or bar.

It might be possible replace a damaged table top with a cut glass sheet or plastic panel purchased from Home Depot.

The use of rear projection suggests that it should at least be relatively simple and cheap to scale Surface to any arbitrary size or shape, for vertical or horizontal mounting.

Surface can read codes stamped into objects. Glasses. Cameras. Game pieces. Surface can communicate with objects - perhaps over a Bluetooth link or something faster.

Surface seem to do most of its work in software. I can't see any objection to using simple, reliable, off the shelf hardware.

Re:please....MS Surface is not touch

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Once again - MS Surface has nothing to do with touching. Except for the minor detail that it reacts when you 'touch' the glass.

Amalgam

[Ethanol-fueled]

I can't wait until they combine one of these with one of these and get this. A patent abstract is here.

Touch Feedback?

[Doc Ruby]

Anyone got a touchscreen surface covered in something that can feed back directly to the touching fingertips? Like a memory plastic which can raise bumps and ridges around the "GUI", so fingertips can easily tell widget boundaries and tell them apart?

Is there some dynamic Braille surface that could be made transparent to do this for everyone? We're all blind behind our fingertips blocking the screen.

GPC vs Embedded device

[fermion]

First the touch screen as the user for embedded devices, like phones, gas pumps, store check out registers, has long been established. These devices serve limited well defined purposes, can be sold at high enough prices to support the hardware and integration engineering,

Second, just because one as a touch screen does not mean on does not have a WIMP. This is such a basic flaw in the article, that I stopped reading TFA. In the simples case, the Pointer is the touch part of the screen. In more extreme cases, the menu structure may be simplified to pre-WIMP norms, though in most cases such menus will be based on configurable icons, not text. This does not, however, mean that the menu does not exist.

What we have been seeing lately, and what does exist on the general purpose computer, like a Mac or x86 running an MS OS, is the point taking on additional functionality, such as scrolling, zooming, etc. The complexity of completing such tasks vary. On the Apple, touch pads used gestures to scroll while an HP might have a dedicated part of the touch pad scroll. IN particular, Apple did not import the functionality of the iPhone as a touch screen application, but as a touch pad enhancement, an enhancement that appears to be mostly hardware related.

The question we have to ask is do we want our screen to be both out input and output device. For compact integrate devices like phones there is some advantage. But for a GPC, is there an advantage over a mouse, or even the command line? Mice are very efficient at moving quickly over large screen real estate, and can be very precise. Mice can be more efficient at moving through large documents than even the command line. Do I think I can edit this document faster if I had to touch the screen to move around? I don't think so.

Touch screens will continue to proliferate as interfaces to embedded devices. If they get cheaper, they will added on as a gee whiz accessory, just like the 238 USB ports and memory card readers and even floppy drives Re now added just so the feature list does not look so inferior. But it will still be a WIMP interface.

I don't think so

[nguy]

Touch screens with vertical surfaces are unusable for routine work (they're OK for ATMs) because arms get tired. Touch screens with horizontal surfaces take up valuable desktop space unnecessarily and appear to cause neck and back problems.

Touch screens have been around essentially as long as mice. Mice won because they work incredibly well; no other pointing device even comes close.

RSI worse with touchscreens?

[gilesjuk]

Mice and keyboards get blamed for RSI, touch screens will be worse is the software isn't designed for it.

For example, dragging things around on a touch screen puts more strain on your fingers and requires 1:1 movement.

Few people have 1:1 mapping on their mouse, that is the distance moved by the mouse directly equates to the distance the cursor moves on screen.

Moving your arms around a large touch screen will soon become tiring.

Re:RSI worse with touchscreens?

[Velocir]

I'm willing to bet you won't have to maintain contact the whole time, even when dragging things (highlight item with left hand, touch destination with right hand: zero arm movement). Besides which, a little added physical exertion will be a good thing for many computer users...