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Why Did Touch Take 4 Decades to Catch On?
theodp writes "You probably saw media coverage of Bill Gates showing off touch-screen technology to his CEO play group last week. With the introduction of the iPhone and iPod Touch, touch (and multi-touch) technology — which folks like Ray Ozzie enjoyed as undergrads way back in the early '70s — has finally gone mainstream. The only question is: Why did it take four decades for its overnight success? Some suggest the expiration of significant patents filed during '70s and '80s may have had something to do with it — anything else?"
I think that the same reason why touchscreen technology never caught on until recently is the same reason why motion controllers like the Wiimote never caught on until the Wii, because the previous of both concepts where crap and didn't offer anything over a mouse, keyboard and joystick. Actually, what it really comes down to is that if a form of control doesn't give anything over the defacto form, then its pointless. How many stupid microphones and control devices have been released in the past 30 years that were no better than just pressing the button on a joystick. If it doesn't really understand that I'm saying "Fire!" instead of just blowing into it, then its pointless. It also has a lot to do with the interface being standard to the system. When its an addon, it just doesn't get as much attention.
This is for the same reason that command pipes/stdin/stdout will always be more useful in unix-like OSes than they will in Windows. Because they essentially come with the system and 90% of the programs are setup to use them. Same as why REXX was so much more successful on the Amiga than it will be on any other OS. If the Wiimote had been an option item, then the software wouldn't have been there and the Wii would have probably been a flop.
Touchscreens are visual interfaces, keyboards/-pads are haptic interfaces. For most devices, keys make more sense because they're always in the same place and the touch feedback makes it possible to use them without looking. I do not want a touchscreen remote control, for example. Touchscreens only make sense for complicated or multi-function devices and those haven't been portable very long.
Most technologies take a while to become mainstream. NAND flash was invented in 1988 and took almost 20 years to become mainstream. Linux was started in 1991?? and is almost mainstream.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I don't think it was just a matter of patents expiring, it was most likely because the technology was finally ready for it. In the past most touchscreen-equipped systems I've seen seemed to be pretty weak in every area except the touchscreen, these days the machines equipped with touchscreens are powerful enough to actually take advantage of the touchscreen capabilities.
That said, I'm still waiting for a tablet mac with multitouch tech and a built-in wacom tablet (like the Cintiq) so that I can use my hands to drag stuff around on my desktop and the stylus for actually drawing stuff.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Comment removed based on user account deletion
YouTube Link (1.9+m views) (2003)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp-y3ZNaCqs
TED Talk
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/65
while Jeff didnt invent multitouch, he certainly brought it to the attention of a lot of people with a good demo and a few teaser apps (maps) to show what could be done
MS, Apple and chums have a lot to thank him for as far as raising public awareness of different UI and OS possibilities, using a mouse/qwerty keyboard should not be a fundamental of interacting with computers
touch is junk and nothing out there that people buy uses it. MULTI-TOUCH caught on. multi touch was invented by two professors at the university of delaware, who founded a company that made the greatest keyboard of all time, the touchstream lp. jobs saw the inherent promise of multi-touch and bought the company and all its ip, in the process making everyone sign nondisclosure agreements and burying the company. the price of the greatest keyboard ever made, no longer available due to job's actions, has rocketed to over $1000 on ebay and keeps going up.
a lot of you are reading this and thinking of non multi touch products that are getting some sales; however they use the fundamental tech that makes multi touch work. multi touch was about figuring out the shape and pressure of the fingers being applied, in addition to distinguishing multiple fingers. this eliminates the "palm brush" problem that plagued early touch pads.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,1039254,00.asp
http://fingerfans.dreamhosters.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=842
it took a long time for people to figure out what happened; in the end one of the delaware professors listed his profession as 'apple engineer' on a public political contribution and the mystery of the jobs touchstream "nuclear option" was solved.
the reason it's caught on "just now" is that it's actually brand new technology. hopefully someone someday will undo that damage that apple has done to the multitouch industry by buring it under NDA's and patents. in the meantime, they have usurped microsoft for title of tech company most damaging to progress. let's see how long they can hold the crown.
I remember how exciting the touch screens seemed in the late 80s, but when using them reality set in - you quickly fatigue holding your arm up to touch a screen.
Plus, with any user interface people need a certain confidence in correspondence between what they do and what happens. When you push a button, you KNOW it got pressed. If you push a joystick left, you KNOW you're going left. That 'payoff' is like a contract between you and the machine that goes favorably. But if pressing the screen where you believe you need to press may or may not do what you want, that contract gets shaky. Especially since there's no click or motion to reinforce what you're doing. This, by the way, is why I think 'free space' VR controllers never caught on...at least until the WII.
Still, software can create cues to take the place of physicality and have 'grease' to avoid common miscues. Plus, having the screen be horizontal reduces the fatigue.
But in the end, as archaic as the keyboard seems compared to touch and speech, it really is an incredibly expressive and low-energy-requirement device.
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
This will sound like I'm a total Apple fanboy, but I'm not and I don't think that everything that Apple does is great. However, Apple has a way with understanding consumer needs and to make geeky technology attractive and useful for the average person (and by average, I of course mean anyone rich enough to by their often overpriced gear).
To this day, I don't fully trust touchscreen, to the point where I will not even consider an iphone or any other phones without actual physical buttons. To this day I still find myself using ATM machines where I have to repeatedly jab at spots on a screen that either will not respond to touch or that are slightly misaligned.
Lightpens never caught on, a shame really as I like the idea.
Problem is back then the screen technology was poor, low res and curved.
Touch isn't very useful when you have room for a mouse and/or keyboard. Big and bulky desktops don't have much use for touch (except when used in place of a mouse, but that has been going on for a long time).
The reason touch has become so popular lately is because it has only been recently that powerful chips have become small enough and that power (batteries) have become light enough that we can find use for this stuff right in our pockets--where a mouse/keyboard just isn't practical. (Unless you believe in thumb keyboards, but those are very cumbersome IMO.)
The greasy 70's and sweaty 80's rendered touch screens intolerable after any sort of use. Now, people are much less greasy and sweaty.
I swear no one had AC in the 80's.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
...the gorilla arm?
Seriously, touch-screen CRTs were an extraordinary pain in the ass. Aside from the gee-whiz factor, they were useless as input devices.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
I personally don't think it is as easy to use. You don't get the feed back you when you use a input device like a keyboard. You can't "feel" where the keys are. You need to stare at the screen to use the technology. On simple and small devices like phones it makes more sense because you have to cram so much into so little. For everyday workstations it does not makes sense. Look at the touch screen / motion sensitive input media wall type devices. Would you really want to stand around waving your hands all day long to manipulate your device? Some people should to get some exercise, but I think an 8 hour work day a waving your hands around would be tiring.
You have to wave your arms around - which is very tiring (much more so than a couple of finger movements for a mouse). that means you can't keep it up for more than a couple of minutes. If you don't beleive me, just try holding your arm aoutstretched for any length of time.
Second, it takes up an enormouse amount of space. Your fingers don't have the dots-per-inch resolution of a mouse, so the interface area has to be bigger and therefore more expensive.
On a purely practical point, you also cover up the object you're addressing. Unless you have transparent fingers, you can't see all the detail of whatever's underneath. A basic and unresolvable design flaw.
Finally, there's the goo factor. Imagine all the smears, stains and gunge that will accumulate on the touch surface - both from your hands and everyone else who uses it. Apart from the obvious hygiene issues, the surface will get dirty. We know how annoying the occasional fingerprint is on a screen - now think what it'll be like when the screen is covered in grease and other smudges.
In summary, it never caught on. The only people who advocate it are those who've watched Minority Report a few too many times. It's not cool, it's not futuristic and hopefully is doomed to the junkheap of techno-history along with punch-cards and robo-vacuum cleaners.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Honestly, would you pick your nose after rubbing your finger in someone else's pee?
And the new thingy was just lying there on the bench. Yoorikah, chumps!
Innovation often enters the mainstream when someone says "they'll pay more / more often for this thingy".
Electric can openers originally existed to make more money than the saturated manual can opener market.
Beyond that, they do make sense, and "well done" to those who use it in a suddenly-obvious wonderful way.
If Apple were a normal company making a jillion dollars on Macs, you might not have ever seen the iPhone.
But then you have to factor in Steve jobs and Jonathan Ive, who don't think like normal people.
And yes, I know - the soccer ball iMac was more "because we can and you'll buy it" than "design and logic had a baby".
But hey.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Who needs touch screens to insert text in a command line? (70's and 80's way)
Unless the UI is appealing and useful, they don't add any value, that's why they are becoming popular now.
Math is beautiful... e^(pi*i)+1=0
honestly, when thinking of the zillions of public terminals with a touch screen interface i ve used so far, i always thought touchscreens suck. like most of us, i figured it s probably because im missing the haptic feedback. however, after recent playing with the newest apple touchscreen products, i figured out the real thing that was bugging me out: for some strange bogonic reason those terminals always had an unbearable latency time, you push and then .... finally, after ages, the screen would react. the apple products have no lag, and surprise, they are actually quite enjoyable to use
Your question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect assumptions.
Touch didn't "just catch on." It's been around forever and has been evolving steadily and is being used in more and more places. You're postulating that because the iPhone uses touch and Bill Gates did a demo that now, May 2008, it has "arrived"? Touch isn't just now "catching on," it's simply becoming more and more common as technology improves. The regular iPod has had a touch-sensitive wheel ever since the 2nd generation. Laptops have had trackpads for ages. PDAs have had touch-sensitive screens since, well, as long as they've been around. I've seen touchscreen kiosks and ordering screens (Arby's used to have them) The only thing I can say is that as touch technology improves in the same way that all technology improves--becoming cheaper and smaller, in addition to better--it's being offered in more devices where small and cheap matters--i.e., portables.
I had a touchscreen 17" CRT at home almost ten years ago, and while it was really neat--there's something really satisfying about actually pressing a link with your finger to 'click' on it--it was a pain (literally) to use for any extended amount of time. Touch works best when your arms can be at rest, which means your hands won't move much, which means a small device. Now, who wants to poke on a tiny screen on their desk, when they could instead use a mouse and keyboard to manipulate objects on a 20" screen? No one. So, where does that leave us? Where is touch useful? Ding ding ding! In tiny devices that are already in your hand. Or, to put it another way, it's not so much that touch is just now "catching on," it's that we're finally finding things that it's really good for. Like I said, a touchscreen is not a good replacement for a regular old mouse.
Multitouch is a nice new addition to touch technology, but you know what? I hardly ever use it on my iPhone. I rarely zoom in or out. I click and drag a lot, and double-tap to zoom in and out, but this is nothing that couldn't have been done on a mid-90s Palm.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
You could ask the same question about CD technology, plasma TV, the computer. Alot of technology we have today was developed 20/30/40 years ago, the problem is that that its not profitable or easy to manufacture, develop, and sell these technologies.
This applies to the touch screen table tops and such. We had this technology for a while but its just now were the price to sell the product and the price to produce for the product is in reach of both huge corporations and smaller companies.
For the past thirty years most fast food stores were using the stander hierarchy register machine, green display, you pressed a keypad that added an item and it was top to bottom, very difficult to go back to the top of the list to modify a mistake. Now you go to Mcdonalds, they have touch screen displays, they display the image of the food(Big Mac), you press the items they want or do not want(lettuce, ketchup,mustard), and there is the order and if you need to correct a mistake you can easily click an item and fix the mistake.
Could they have had these type of registers earlier? Yeah, but they weren't cost effective till about 2000 when I believe they started to slowly replace the older registers with these registers.
The point is, the technology is there, its just a matter of making it cheap enough and affordable for companies and people to develop it and buy it.
The day I have a table the size of my kitchen table that can support six people playing an RTS, all through touch screens, none of that voice crap that ive seen on youtube, and were yelling off commands and tactics to each other against six other people in another room, will be the day I crap my pants.
linux is "almost mainstream" ?
honestly, as much as I'd like that to be true, you gotta be deluding yourself
I think the reason you haven't seen touch catch on before now is because of how horrendous it is. Tactile feedback isn't just a side effect of current interface methods, it's an important aspect to input. Even ignoring problems with touch that may be solved as the technology matures (dirt/grease, unintentional gestures, dirtying up a display that doubles as the input device, losing finger position), touch simply doesn't feel like interaction.
As far as actual devices go, having sold both touch and classical variants on appliances, I can say that the more often someone uses a touch interface, the less inclined they are to continue using it. When someone's favorite model transitions to a 'touch' type interface, they can't return it for what they had been using fast enough. It's the hot new thing that nobody likes to use, but everyone thinks is real pretty.
Even Star Trek, the hands-down Sci-Fi 'King of Touch' acknowledged the technology's limitations. To quote Tom Paris: "I am tired of tapping panels. For once, I want controls that let me actually feel the ship I'm piloting."
What the heck is a 'sig'?
If you're dangling from said rope with only an iPhone in your hand, you're pretty much screwed - unless you have learned the trick of operating it's touch-screen with your nose.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Touchscreens have been available in all kinds of devices, but for long they were expensive, the thick glass on top of CRT diminished clarity (not to mention fingerprints), and they were poorly integrated with the system. Touchscreens were fine in information kiosks designed to use them, but no so good on my Axim and Sony UX280 which have crappy interfaces to deal with (hear that Windows).
Apple made a good job on this and they deserve the credit for it (or whoever they xerox the idea from).
Two words: gorilla arm.
Mod parent up. Touch-screens have been around for many years, in fast food, industrial control, kiosks, and similar casual-use push-big-buttons applications. Touch screens are a huge pain for a session long enough that you want to sit down. So they're useful for palm-sized devices.
But for text editing, or graphical input? No way. It's too blunt a tool.
A finger is a rather clumsy interface device compared to the pinpoint precision offered by a mouse. And when the OS and all of the software on that platform is designed for a keyboard and a mouse, then change becomes hard.
Read Apple's user interface guidelines for developing applications and web applications for the iPhone. Touch screen interfaces truly require (to overuse the phrase once again) a new interface paradigm.
Multitouch trackpads, on the other hand, simply overlay gestures on top of existing mechanisms. A two-finger tap is a "right click". A two-finger scrolling gesture translates easily into "scroll wheel" input. All events which existing systems and software understand.
A "pinch", however, is a new type of input that has no translation. As such, software has to be reprogramed to understand that type of event, and then perform the appropriate behavior.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
In order for touch, and multi-touch to be successful requires a large amount of UI bandwidth for feedback and interaction, it needs to be nearly seamless to work well.
Prior to current days, hardware just made better user interactions. A keyboard or a mouse do a lot of complicated things to feel right to the user, and yet output a simple qualified input to the computer system.
Today all of that complexity and even more is being placed into the UI at the expense of other activities, which until relatively recently was mostly CPU bound.
The last was the elegant creation of the idea to fire up everyone else. In this case the Iphone.
But just like the advancements in keyboards, mouse, trackpads, and game controllers we have only seen the beginning.
My hope is that this will also catch on with the tablet form factor, where somebody will wake up and realize the best place for the menu on a tablet is probably not the upper right hand corner, where a righty will obscure the screen. And that it probably deserves to exist or the right hand side for most items, and even look a lot more like the office ribbon, than the standard menu bar.
This is cool though, we are on the cusp of the next wave of UI. That that comes after the current mouse oriented menu and panel methods. It will be cool!
this has to be the most braindead post on /. ever.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I expect the growth of forums like http://www.nuigroup.com/forums/ and wide use of http://nuigroup.com/touchlib/ which is part of Google's Summer of Code 2008 projects might have something to do with it. Now that it's accessible to DIY'ers there is a lot more community support for home-lab research into materials and methods like http://easterisland-llc.com/ or http://www.multitouch.nl/ as examples.
Because it was (re?)introduced to the masses with the DS in a way that showed them how it could be useful and entertaining. Before, all the average user could do was buy a really expensive and hard to find computer monitor with limited applications that were geared toward the device itself (as opposed to just letting you control mouse cursor clicks or menu selections). I'm sure a lot of people wanted the benefits of the device before now, but they were concerned with smearing or scratching their screens, and paying a lot for very little gain. PDAs were the only semi-common item with touch screens, but they were complicated to the average user and didn't have any entertaining or immediately appealing uses for the touch technology.
Now, on cheaper and smaller devices that have extended themselves to include many applications that familiarize users with these capabilities (iPod Touch, iPhone, DS, is there much else that is reaching the mass audience and catching the attention of your grandpa?), it sometimes makes more sense than dedicated buttons, plus anything that increases screen real-estate makes it more attractive to the consumer.
Besides, what devices could have benefited from touch screens in the past, where it wouldn't have been cost prohibitive? Were the devices missing their target audience and not being purchased because of the lack of these features? Aren't we just following the natural evolution of these devices given market reception to surprisingly successful risks that Nintendo and Apple have taken?
Twinstiq, game news
In addition to a lot of the reasons mentioned above, it's only recently that it's become reasonably durable and reliable. I remember the early touch screens, and the damn things couldn't hold up in public. Something that's always on the fritz, no matter how cool or easy to use, is inferior to something that's functional and reliable. In some regards, the technology probably arrived too early, and enough people got burned on the early generations that it hurt the development.
Linux is mainstream in servers; but definitely not on the desktop.
It took a while for the mouse to catch on as a computer interface. And if you compare the first mouse to even one of today's cheapest offerings, most users will agree the original sucks in comparison. Likewise, it took time for the touch screen interface to catch on. The accuracy used to be questionable at best, and they would frequently start to fail after a modest amount of use. (as is many iPhones still developed "dead" spots on their touch screens)
Any technology takes time to "catch on" in a mainstream fashion due to several reasons. 1) it's pricey, 2) the first/early version(s) is/are lacking in ergonomics, 3) the first/early version(s) is/are lacking in quality/robustness.
All these things are improved as technology matures, the touch screen just followed the normal progression of things. It was expensive, poorly implemented, and fragile, and is now affordable, effective (for certain applications), and robust (mostly), and will continue to improve.
--Not to be worried, Pitr fix.
This is not unusual. At the dawn of the industrial revolution, James Watts patents on a key aspect of the steam engine held back the industrial revolution by several decades.
It hasn't caught on really. The technology has just gotten cheaper to whore to the general consumers by corporate dictators like Steve Jobs. People are still oohed by the coolness factor.
With lots of games on them.
Don't forget cell phones.
Money is the root of all evil?
The one piece of tech that really makes touch possible is flatscreen LCD technology with scratch-proof surfaces and rapid response. That's important. But what's even more important is designing products for touch, not just slapping it on.
Take the iPhone. When you use it, you're not just using your fingers - you're also using the hand holding the item, keeping it in place and even moving it a little to assist in accuracy. Physically it is better suited to touch than a laptop, which up until recently were thick and heavy. Also, laptops generally have a mandatory keyboard getting in the way. Worse, the keyboard/mouse combo is more convenient for the GUI OS in place. The iPhone on the other hand completely reinvented the GUI to support touch. Other new technologies like the touch table are doing much the same thing, albeit in different ways.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
People keep saying that touch screen is tiring over a period of time, but if implimented correctly they would probably work fairly well. Especially with LCDs, it is possible to lay touch screens horizontally, pretty much destroying the fatigue argument. For people who want some kind of feedback, the computer can make a clicky noise in the same way that digital cameras mask a noise when a photo is taken. The last problem would be the click lag..meh.
It "took this long" to catch on because its kinda klutzy.
/and/ a touch-screen with a rather nice finger keyboard. But it still blows. I can type a message on the phone with the keyboard and not take my eyes off the road, but not so on a touch screen. there's no tactile feedback!
My PDA phone has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard
All the ingredients have been around for a while, but it's only now that they have come together in a big enough way to be noticed: battery power, compute power, UI design, display quality, applications that people will actually buy.
I have an iPod Touch and love it as a portable media/information gadget. But I also despise the way Apple are handling the SDK rollout. I'm not going to invest a dime on development for it if I have no guarantee that I will ever be able to run what I write on a real device.
...laura
Depends on the situation, I suppose.
Oppressing an entire population is never cheap.
--Jeckler (/. Beta IS GARBAGE!)
Now you know why. this lower caps random characters are here merely to get around /.'s lame lameness filter that doesn't understand i used all the caps above to look like yelling because that is what anybody would be doing with a high priced bleeding edge touch screen and an umfriend with greasy kfc. what fools these admin mortals be.
I developed for touchscreen technology back in the early 80s (prototype calculator/point-of-sale application). Touchscreen technology just plain sucked back then. It required frequent recalibration, and its resolution was piss-poor.
Let the conspiracy theorists postulate about patents all they want, the fact of the matter is, it wasn't ready back then (and neither were the platforms to use it - who'd want a touchscreen on their 4.77 MHz 8088 PC?).
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
Link.
So, your men's room computer has a mouse, I take it?
linux is "almost mainstream" ? honestly, as much as I'd like that to be true, you gotta be deluding yourself
He is not deluding himself. He is viewing things from the majority frame of reference, Linux is a server operating system, while you are viewing things from the minority frame of reference, Linux is a server and a personal and an embedded operating system. If you were to sit in on business school classes today you would find nearly everyone has heard of Linux and it is synonymous with servers. So much so that specifying server applications would seem redundant. Linux is mainstream in the "public" mind, but only in the domain of servers.
Cost.
à_à
It depends on what you mean by "caught on". Touch screens have been used in kiosk systems and ATMs for decades. They've been in PDAs for many years. The only place they haven't caught on is in the PC and I see no indication that this is changing. "Surface" is not being sold.
Touch didn't catch on for personal monitors because it is inferior as an input device to a mouse. It works for kiosks or ATMs because people don't use them for long periods and are in a better posture for touch screens and because they are obviously much sturdier than mice. They've been used for PDAs for decades, so the "iPod Touch" is hardly an instance of "catching on". The original Palm had a touch screen as did the Newton. (Though ones designed for a stylus.)
The cake is a pie
The greasy 70's and sweaty 80's rendered touch screens intolerable after any sort of use. Now, people are much less greasy and sweaty. I swear no one had AC in the 80's.
:-)
If you are on to something here then touch is doomed. The green movement wants to reduce the usage of air conditioning. Furthermore, last night I saw a green public service announcement advising less bathing and shaving. It advised not washing your hair and having women "put their hair up" in some sort of stylish fashion to hide this, and for men to where a baseball cap as their camouflage. Also, the men were advised that the scruffy unshaven look was "in". Sometimes reality is far funnier than what we can dream up.
Honestly, would you pick your nose after rubbing your finger in someone else's pee?
... The myth busters did an episode, apparently contamination from the bathroom spreads surprising far in a building just through the air let alone direct contact.
Honestly, you have probably already done so many times. Assuming of course that your are not suffering from some compulsive disorder and constantly popping out the hand sanitizer after touching every door knob, counter top, chair,
Software, electronic minaturaisation, battery technology, wireless connectivity - all at reasonable prices... plus convincing user scenarios.
;-)
I think the latter was the key. Specifically like the CD-ROM and the internet, pr0n was the key ingredient. For example college students have defeated the mirrors placed in the back of classrooms by going to smaller screens.
It turns out that displays presented best for viewing are worst for manipulating.
Question for you: Do you think Apple Newton having colourless resolution would have benefited well from multi-touch technology? Even if so, how would they have fit multi-touch capability and the processing to handle it into such as small (tongue in cheek) box at the time? Having been born before the 80s it's weird seeing posts speculating about why a technology was not used for decades. For us having been in the trenches the whole time it's much more obvious.
I think you're missing the most important part. Touch interfaces that are being used in mass production are in the form of Point Of Sale machines and Cell Phones.
A touch based point of sale machine, 30 years ago, would cost so much more than a cash register that it wouldn't even remotely have a chance. Cells Phones, well, a touch based Car Phone that could check your e-mail in 80s would have been bought by SOMEONE, but the rest of the population would have wondered WTF it was for.
Other than those two applications, touch interfaces fail. Neither one of them were feasible to use on a large scale until the last couple years recently.
Burn Hollywood Burn
i recall seeing touch screens as the "next big thing" all over the place in the '84 Knoxville World's Fair, full 12x10 screens and all, yet my first touch device was a palm in 2002.
Now, the one place they made it HUGE was in restaurants, where hardly a place lacks one (half dozen) now. context is key - a place to enter orders without looking for a keyboard, a place to manage table occupancy, integrated with the credit card system to avoid an extra piece of hardware that could break - the new systems had it all and have had it for over ten years now.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
I worked at Carroll Touch for a while on Touch screen drivers for their IR and Guided wave products. Before that in 1990-1992 I worked at Laser Plot and worked on adding touch screen for their Ship Navigation Systems.
The problem that many applications ran into is that people have fat fingers. A mouse is much more precise than a finger. Many people who looked at Touch technology just treated it like a mouse, which makes for a had interface. When people get exposed to a mouse/keyboard interface converted into touch, they repulsed by touch and never look back.
If you design an interface from the start to be touch based, you can get a very nice interface.
Fight Spammers!
Ray Ozzie's "touch screen pointing device" was a light-pen. Those things were awkward, low-resolution, slow, expensive as hell and gave you tennis-elbow if you used one for any length of time (think of it in terms of using a flashlight instead of a mouse). That's why they were only used where there was no practical alternative.
Light-pens are why track balls and mice were so successful, and there is no connection whatsoever between light-pens and modern touch-screens.
It's pure silliness to say that technology has "caught on" or "finally gone mainstream".
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
The only real innovation I see in "touch" is coming from Apple, not Microsoft.
As usual, Gates is behind the curve. Why in the world does anyone think Bill Gates is a forward-looking thinker? All he knows about is the maintenace of monopolies, and the stifling of innovation to accomplish the same.
Why do monopolies stifle innovation?
I think it was when size became an issue. I think touch has a long way to go, but ultimately it will be preferable on a mobile device where space is a problem.
There are some applications where they provide the most functional user interface; Apple uses them to great advantage on their iPhone and iPod Touch. It allows rich user interaction on a pocket sized device; no room there for a keyboard or fancy set of buttons. They're not so useful on something like a laptop; there's a keyboard that's much more useful - and the software to make any kind of use of a laptop touch screen is yet to be developed.
Something tells me that history will repeat itself again. Someone will create a workable touch screen interface for general purpose computers, then a major software company will "borrow" the idea and popularize it. The innovators won't get a dime - or any recognition - but the technology will finally break through to the general public.
Many, many, many of our technological breakthroughs are the direct result of military R & D. The mainstream consumer might be about 10-20 years behind that curve.
:-)
If that's the case, touch technologies are now outdated enough to allow the average consumer to purchase them for daily use.
At the risk of sounding like an idiot pointing out the obvious:
A touchscreen display is a combination of two things. A touch-capable interface, and a screen.
It's taken 4 decades for little touchscreen displays to take off because it's taken 4 decades for little screens to take off. Without the snazzy lcd screens and the lithium ion batteries to power them, you wouldn't have the enormous number of devices that are ripe for conversion to touchscreens.
$0.02.
I suspect one of the reasons (if not the reason) it's successful on the iPhone is because it's not a screen that's fixed vertically in front of you. It's a screen you can hold in your hands, and all you have to do to point is move your fingers. This is much less fatiguing than holding up and moving your entire arm to use it. (This is also why I'm doubtful Microsoft's TouchWall will succeed. It'll work for a tabletop, but it's not going to work on a wall except for the simplest tasks, at which point it's not worth the cost.)
With every comment I am reading I just keep wondering why people do not seem to remember the old ATM interfaces. The blue and white IBM screen with the numeric keypad and the options to withdraw/etc .....
... how you scroll)....
...
People are talking about how it needs super fast processing, and that it does not work in character mode.
Well, take the $80 sony programmable remote, take the ipod (yes, the original ipod is touch technology
And finally the so much hated but so much used trackpad, the one sitting on everyone's laptop. That is not technology either with just recently got popular.
Ohh... also catering systems, hotel systems and many others use touch technology for a long time
Just my 2c
Touch hasn't gone anywhere. There isn't a restaurant in a Merka that doesn't sport a touch interface, if'n they have a POS system.
illegitimii non ingravare
40 years seriously is _fast_ in the computing business.
Just look at the GRAIL-system from the end of the 1960s. (It's somewhere in the 3rd 3rd I think, it has flowchart like graphics on the screen)
http://www.archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987
That old system is still more advanced than anything you can buy today.
40 years is essentially nothing in UI development. There are lots of usefull concepts to be explored. Like typed natural language interfaces.
If you are answering this question, then obviously you never had to deal with one of the early touchscreen systems.
We had a touchscreen "card catalog" system at the Philly public library back in the 80s. It didn't work too well. It didn't always know when you were touching it, and sometimes it would register the touch in the wrong place entirely. Also, it forced you to spend long periods of time standing with your arm in front of you poking at the screen. This caused an uncomfortable soreness in your arm, known as Gorilla Arm. In fact, this is typically seen as an example of failed usability design.
Plus, you have to remember that interfaces at the time weren't particularly graphical. So you were using a touch-screen interface to actuate an all-text system. A keyboard would have made a lot more sense. Instead, you were forced to learn a completely new metaphor, with no actual improvement to the user experience.
Touchscreens didn't really make any sense until you had things that you could click on and drag around.
Should have said "If you are asking this question" not "If you are answering this question." Sorry.
Ideas first come when the technology exists to implement them, but don't catch on until the technology exists to implement them well. It's a pattern we've seen over and over. Cars existed for decades before Henry Ford figured out how to make one that non-experts could use. The first automatic transmissions were terrible. Home computers were purely hobbyist items until they became powerful enough to have text-based interfaces, and didn't really take off until graphical user interfaces. The major difference between YouTube and any of a dozen other streaming video sites is that YouTube was smart enough or lucky enough to launch right around the time when the millionth home got broadband. Touchscreens found a niche (point-of-sale systems) where their (numerous and severe) flaws didn't matter, and never strayed from that niche until Apple (etc.) fixed those flaws.
It's simply the normal life cycle for technology.
The original Howling Frog is a fictional character and has no UID.
Have you ever been to a grocery store where they have the self-checkout lanes? I'd say that its a comedy of errors but I'm the guy standing there thinking, "See where it says pay now, press PAY FUCKING NOW!"
See, the problem is all the animations. Carts zooming around and other things that get people to say, "Oh! Look at the Frosted Flakes, they're spinning!"
Here's what should happen:
Screen says "Scan your shit"
Screen says "Put your shit in bags"
Screen says "Pay for your shit"
Screen says "Pick up your shit and get the hell out"
Yeah, that would be sweet.
Why didn't it catch on before? It has never existed before.
"Touch" didn't catch on. The iPhone did.
Bill Gates demoed something different that might also be cool, but I have yet to see the technology available to me in any form.
Perhaps if he'd done something with it like, hmmm, make a consumer product? Well then maybe that product would have had a chance.
--mostly unrelated, had a dream last night that Apple was making a tablet almost identical to the iPhone but bigger (10 or 12" diagonal i think). And they were fairly cheap.
They tended to stack well and would be handed out in meetings preloaded with stuff, then used to interact during the meeting with each other and with the "whiteboard"
Not that I really believe in dreams or anything (or have any damn idea why I'm dreaming about non-existent apple products!) but it occurred to me while thinking about it later that if they were going in that direction, a first step might be to start developing a really thin computer first... Maybe still keep the fold-up form-factor for a while...
Sorry, it's late.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
.. for many OSes including DOS and installed by default on mainframes, well IBM's anyway - OS/390 (et al) and z/OS (the latest incarnation).
Your point here is valid: If it's installed by default then acceptance and usage is much more likely. How long does it take for something useful to be taken up and used everywhere?
I'd like to know why you believe that REXX was more successful on Amiga than, say, IBM's range of Mainframe OSes?
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
If you use a touch screen for an hour your arm falls off. Human arms are not muscled to hover. Mice won out because you can lay your arm on the desk and push the mouse around with minimal muscle power. Minority Report looked great but if you had to do wave your arms around all day long you'd die of cramps overnight.
Is that like daycare, except for your company's CEO?
Touch has been in continuous use where it makes sense: ATMs, cell phones, information panels, etc. Palm has sold touch screen phones for nearly a decade.
Apple's and Microsoft's use of touch is insignificant in comparison. As usual, these companies are late to the party and try to take credit for technologies that others have puoneered.
how do you tell what you're typing by the sound of a touch screen? why did it just get hotter in here?
You WERE intending this for a Funny mod right?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
You have to get close to the screen because the head of the person you're telling to "click there" is in a different place and so more than a cm away and the parallax means they click on the button next to where you're pointing. And if you're a cm away, that's pretty precise pointing and a little wobble as your shoulder moves means you're now 0cm away.
So I use the back of my finger, the fingernail, to tap the screen.
Show me the fingerprint there.
The vast majority of input to a computer system is in the form of text, usually typed. Whether to produce documents, write an email, send a text message, or whatever it's almost exclusively written language that is being used. Once you learn to type, you can transfer information (or opinion) from your brain to the world much faster using a keyboard. Touchscreens can't touch that. ;-) It call comes down to productivity and easy of use. There is still no better way to input text than a keyboard.
Touch screens are only useful to manipulate aggregate information that has already been produced, or manipulate visually oriented models. They can't really replace a keyboard.
--
The early bird catches the worm. The worm that sleeps late lives to see another day.
Is basically what you're saying.
But then you're using the desk as a draughtsmans area. You can't sit down and watch it, you have to stand up. You can't share the view because you have to stand around it. You can't take it away because, to replace your draughtsmans board, it has to be A2 or bigger.
Your A4 monitor on your PC needs the mouse because your draughting skills need to be 4x to 8x more accurate to use a rule and pen to work on.
For SPECIFIC needs, your desktop can be your monitor, but you now need a place to put all that crap you have on that plank of wood at the moment. Things like: books to refer to, coffee cup, pens, rubbers, rulers, other documents printed out, memos and the like. And your input has to know the difference between someone pointing at something and someone marking the "document".
To replace the draught board would also require a scratch-proof surface that yet was rough enough to grip and give feedback, tough enough not to deform and yet still able to register your input accurately. That's a steep set of requirements. Most durable coatings don't give any grip, so controlling the ruler or the marker so that they don't move isn't going to be easy.
One of the first responders makes points about - does the new interface offer advantages over the standard interface? and is the new interface fitted as standard? Good points, to which the answers are yes and yes for the Psion 5 (and of course, it's follow-up, the 5Mx, and it's follow-down the Revo).
What brought the Psion down it appears from the sidelines as a member of the UK user community, was poor after-sales support in the US, combined with a definite degree of fragility in the screens. Once rigid clamshells for the Psion became available (on the after-market), the issue of screen fragility was resolved. But by then the marketing reputation in the States was settled, and a little upstart company called (I think) Palm brought it's own limited tool onto the market and eventually won out with it's cramped form factor and lack of a keyboard. Oh, and the Palm's less-than-a-month of normal use on off-the-shelf batteries can't have helped them either.
There is still a significant after market in old Psions through eBay, but I've got my couple of spares, so I'm set for the next decade before I need to re-address the PDA question. That'll be 2 decades after the shut down of manufacture of the technology I use at the moment, so there's a modest chance of an improvement in the necessary technologies.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I had one of the first ELO monitors back in the 90s. My dad won it at a Comdex one year and we used it quite a bit. Eventually though we grew bored of it and my mom was the only one using it. She also forgot about it later. Then in 2001 I tried using it and had to look for the serial cable and the software online to make it work with Win ME. Turned out the bottom sensors had since given out ( it could have be ME). But the moral of the story is that touch screens never caught on throughout those years and I loved being able to use my finger to paint electronically. Yet it had a practical use and the food and medical industries could see it. The truth is that even though the general public is not using a certain technology does not mean it is not being used. I also regret every time someone mentions new hand held computers it is like they were just invented. I have been using a pda since I was 9 years old (13 years ago). These Iphones or IPod touches are nothing new. Whats with the "I" prefix anyway? F_(king apple has always been retarded and will always be retarded. They just finally figured out what advertisements can do. There are better cell phones elsewhere, like Korea, that just haven't made it to the US. I mean give me a break.
I agree that the long incubation period for touch tech is weird. For radio, it's been indispensible, ever since the drives got big enough to store a station's entire library of music & commercials (early/mid 90's).
Previously on-air talent (and I use that term loosely) would always need to be busy juggling CDs, tape carts, and records back in days of yore. But all the major "live-assist" radio software for the past decade has been touch-screen interface driven.
sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
...it's so bad.
There are two kinds of people in the world (those that divide the world into two kinds of people, and those that don't...): those who touch my screen and leave fingerprints on it, and those who are *that* close to breaking those fingers.
Touch my screen, you'd *BETTER* clean it before you walk away.
Screw touch screen.
mark
It took recorded audio hundreds of years to catch on, even though it was possible. People don't just start using things on their own. It usually takes a really high profile leader like an Edison, Ford, or Jobless to convince them something really obvious can be useful.
Talking of why certain products take so long to catch on... Where the hell is my screen that is all screen huh? I don't want a border. None, nyet, zip nada. Put the buttons on the back again. If my computer is on, the screen will be/has been set up. I don't need a power button on the bloody monitor! Get rid of the borders, damn it!
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
ya and if im not mistaken, the mouse was invented in the 50's.. how long was it before you saw it on a desktop computer?
It's all in the fine details you can focus on when you combine really good ideas and technologies. The Nintendo DS was successful because it was built upon excellent hardware and software, and Nintendo knows how to make things usable and fun. They also supported their developers well, and the library grew rapidly.
The iPhone is the same thing. Apple brought their usual level of fit and finish to the table, as well as lots of experience with portable industrial design, miniaturization, and fine materials.
Touch took so long to catch on because nobody did it right, plain and simple. The success of these devices isn't due to any one thing that you can just copy, and expect to succeed with. They succeeded because of a lot of effort and sacrifice, and decades of hindsight.