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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.
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
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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?
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 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?
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.
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!
Linux is mainstream in servers; but definitely not on the desktop.
Now, people are much less greasy and sweaty.
No, they're not; fingerprints are still an eyesore on monitors.
There are some appalling grotty screens around work - and they're not touch screens! Some people feel the urge to not just point at the screen, but tap it with their finger for emphasis. Plastic LCD screens aren't as abrasion-resistant as the CRT monitors that replaced them, so when they do clean the thing with whatever dust-laden rag was handy, they often leave a permanent scuff mark.
Look, but don't touch.
Touch did so catch on. Remember the PalmPilot? All the rage like 10 years ago. Had a touch screen. The difference is -- more than multitouch, because similar things can be done with gestures -- the iPhone is 25 times faster, in color, and internet-capable, and a phone, and a camera, plays videos, and has over 16000 times more storage space. It's as fast as a desktop computer from the PalmPilot era.
All kinds of bank machines and kiosks have had touch screens for years. It's not the touch screens that caught on. It's everything else that caught up -- and got cheap enough for consumer goods.
The main problem is remembering the locations of all four remote controls. Not too easy when there are newspapers, cats, notepads, books in the living room area as well.
There is also the added complexity of navigating the customized menu of the DVD player itself, particularly those DVD's with multiple menu pages (for complete collections).
Doing something as simple as switching from watching Sky News to watching a DVD will involve:
1. Switch DVD player on.
2. Place DVD in DVD player.
3. Wait for copyright notice to play.
4. Wait for menu to appear
5. Ensure universal remote is in DVD mode
6. Figure out whether left arrow or down arrow moves between menu options.
7. Wander around until correct menu item is found.
8. Press [Play].
9. Adjust volume until sound level is in comfort zone.
10. Watch DVD.
11. Press stop to end DVD.
12. Remove DVD
13. Switch DVD player off.
14. Adjust satellite/TV volume to get back into comfort range (do this repeatedly due to stupid adverts maximising the sound level they are allowed to play at).
Even freeview satellite offers 300+ channels, and the channels are not easily identified. For BBC 1Scotland it is something like channel 941, for BBC London, it is something like channel 944.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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
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
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
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.
A mouse doesn't even make sense outside of 2D -- look at how CAD engineers all have spinny-balls and knobs and all kinds of other input devices on their desks -- so as revolutionary as the the mouse was, it was still just "2D done right", and not the epitome of HCI. And even in 2D, anybody who's at all serious about precision seems to have other input devices: every webcomic I've read in the past 5 years is either scanned from paper, or drawn on a Wacom tablet (or Cintiq). If the mouse is so great compared to more direct input devices, why are people who care spending hundreds (or thousands, in the case of the Cintiq) of dollars for alternatives?
Well, except probably Dinosaur Comics. 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. "Drag" had no translation before the mouse was introduced -- recall that in 1984 Apple literally had to have salesmen go out and teach people how to use mice. (If you were born since 1984, this very idea is probably laughable.) So basically multitouch was revolutionary in the same way the mouse was in 1984, and we just needed a company (Apple, again) with both the brains and balls to do it, and since they rehired the Steve (only 10 years ago), between making the iMac, transitioning to a completely new OS, building the iPod, transitioning to a new CPU architecture, and becoming one of the biggest sellers of music and movies, this is about the first free chance they've had in a couple years.
I'm no Apple fanboi (I use Linux at home), but these kinds of innovations are at the intersection of hardware and software, and Apple has proved to be the best at that area. Only a couple other companies have shown to be very good at this at all -- Palm and Tivo come to mind. But Tivo isn't really a device for which touch makes sense, and Palm's big innovation (Graffiti) was kind of a special-purpose alternative to touch.
The success of the iPhone has nothing to do with multi-touch as what little it brings to that device can be replaced with little consequence. Multi-touch is a buzzword, nothing more.
Talk all you want about old keyboards but don't imply that they evolved into the iPhone.
In other news, apparently nobody has bought the leading handheld video game machine, leaving analysts puzzled as to how it managed to sell over 70 million units in the past 4 years.
Big difference here. When Apple buys a company, its to develop and improve the product, then integrate it into their line. When Microsoft buys a company, as often as not its to kill competition. A lot of what Microsoft buys is simply bought to get it off the market and out of the way.
I think you missed his point: in previous iterations, fingers were too inexact on the existing hardware. Also, they couldn't distinguish all that well if two fingers hit the screen, and the originals did seem to have a lot of "aaargh, I didn't mean to do that!" in them. They were also much more expensive to make in the past, and more prone to wear out. So since mice were cheaper to make and easier to pinpoint, they won for the first decades.
Or are you suggesting that Picasso should have finger-painted and not used brushes? I mean, most digital artists use tablet interfaces... I myself am using a Wacom Intuos tablet at this very moment, so it's not as if every brush is shaped like a bar of soap. I suggest you consider in your metaphor that the mouse is the handle of the brush, but not the head. It may look clumsier than only using fingers, but the variety of tips offers better control in applying paint than fingertips do...