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10/GUI — an Interface For Multi-Touch Input

Posted by Soulskill on from the minority-report-without-the-arm-pain dept.

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."

2 of 344 comments (clear)

  1. Not for desktop pc's, but by sopssa · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Theres still a few problems though. For one, mouse is an incredibly precise input device - you can pretty easily move it along same pixel axis, or get it precisely to a specific pixel. It's hard to do that with your fingers because the area they touch is a large one, it's not easy to just move your finger by one pixel and your hand tend to shake a little bit too. If you look at the video, you see everything in the interface is quite big and even a few small windows take lots of place.

    Other problem is that now your both hands lay on the wide touch area and you dont have a keyboard. If you put them side to side, you'll only have one hand on the touch area and dont get the full power of it. Moving hands between them all the time is inefficient. Typing on the touch area gives no feedback and again takes your hands of the "mouse".

    It would also be quite impossible to play FPS or other kinds of games with this type of setup.

    So no, I still dont see touch interfaces replacing the usual keyboard+mouse combo anytime soon. However, I would love to have this kind of system in my living room (either just for the tv, or the computer thats connected to tv screen). It's clumsy to have keyboard or mouse in living (at the moment I have MX Air -mouse, which is okayish), but this would be perfect for such job. Not for a desktop pc replacement though.

    1. Re:Not for desktop pc's, but by cwgmpls · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I understand that people with disabilities have computer input needs too. But I don't understand why the fact that we are all differently-abled should prevent people from using their abilities to their fullest capacity.

      Does the fact that some people are missing a digit or have paralysis in one arm mean that no one should propose playing a piano with ten fingers? Does that fact that some people don't have feet mean that pianos should not have foot pedals? Of course not.

      While we should move forward with good interface designs for people with disabilities, I don't see why we should stand in the way of people using the abilities they do have in a novel, more productive way.