Slashdot Mirror
10/GUI — an Interface For Multi-Touch Input
Naznarreb writes "R. Clayton Miller has an extremely impressive GUI concept he's calling 10/GUI (video; written description here). Essentially, it combines the high-bandwidth input possibilities of multi-touch interfaces with the ease and immediacy of a mouse. The video is quite interesting, and, for me at least, pretty jaw dropping. This is a dramatic re-imagining of the current mouse/screen schema, one that I think has significant potential."
it's not easy to just move your finger by one pixel
Place finger on surface, then roll finger without lifting or dragging it. I do that all the time on my laptop's trackpad. Besides, you don't need to use pixels as the fundamental unit of movement if your input device can detect movements smaller than a pixel. Putting something at a subpixel position is even easier with modern GPUs (and even Intel GMAs) that power compositing window managers.
It would also be quite impossible to play FPS or other kinds of games with this type of setup.
Even RTS or rail shooters?
I use a track pad all day. It's no problem. I even still have fingerprints.
Apple's multitouch trackpads on their current notebook lines have it right. In fact, they are so good that I wish they would sell a stand alone trackpad to add onto a desktop keyboard. Using gestures to scroll around a window and two finger click or hold and drag are often much faster than moving around with a mouse.
Not that I would ever get rid of a mouse, except (potentially) on a media system with a limited physical keyboard.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
It's not the number of fingers that makes playing piano hard. It's the combinations. The chords are the hard part. Also the independent use of each finger. An interface like this and most other multi-touch interfaces use simple clenching or releasing motions. These are movements that anyone with fully functional hands will have already mastered. They are baby movements.
As for FPS games I don't see the issues I'd say my finger tip is roughly the size of a baddies head. Panning would be a breeze. Group selection in RTS games would be much nicer. If you combined this with a pen for drawing then I could easily see a mouse becoming obsolete.
As for palm interference I doubt that is a hard thing to treat as noise in the input.
The biggest problem is replacing a keyboard. That wont happen any time soon. Though for many tasks (like Gimp/Photoshop, or 3D animation) you could replace the small key combos with larger key areas. Replace 3D mice with circular panning areas and such. I would prefer that the touch screen to display an abstraction of the interface -- window outlines, key areas. Nothing too detailed and distracting -- maybe an e-ink level display.