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."

Comments

Not for desktop pc's, but

[sopssa]

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.

Re:Not for desktop pc's, but

[cwgmpls]

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.

Re:Not for desktop pc's, but

[timeOday]

I switched from VI to emacs about 10 years ago primarily because of emacs' ability to manage multiple windows (by which I mean buffers in this post, not separate X windows), and I still think it offers most all the benefits of 10/GUI! You can have columns of buffers (windows), but also rows (addressing your concern), but they're not just arbitrarily strewn around. You have a high-bandwidth, but precise input channel that doesn't block the screen, called a keyboard. You can easily access a labeled list of open windows. No, I don't expect a resurgence of emacs to wipe out the gui, but people who are designing windowing systems should at least be familiar with how emacs worked. (Maybe emacs borrowed it from lisp machines? I don't know). Granted, keyboards aren't exactly multi-touch (except for modifier keys like SHIFT), but keyboards do utilize the ability to move several fingers at once to achieve high-bandwidth input.

Needs a curved surface

[Anonymous Coward]

The flat surface is not ideal from an ergonomic point of view. The touch-sensitive surface should be curved so that the user's hands can be held at a more natural angle. Preferably two domes of soft, touch-sensitive material, and two small raised dots on the top for tactile positioning. Hm? what? sorry, I drifted off there for a moment... what were we talking about?

Replacing current business work interface

[Dripdry]

I disagree with an earlier poster who says this can't replace the desktop interface we know.

He points out that it is inefficient because one has to move hands between keyboard and pad.
It seems to me that this interface can be manipulated with just one hand. that's how the mouse works now. you take your hand off the mouse to work with the full functionality of the keyboard, why couldn't 10/GUI replace that?
Better still, why not have both! The pad can sense a mouse and act as a mouse pad. If you need to use it as a pad move the mouse off, or perhaps use both the mouse AND the pad at the same time (one hand each). I can see a lot of possibilities there. It could clutter a desk, sure, but I'm sure we can solve that problem.

Second, but probably more importantly, I can easily see this for the work I do, which I imagine is similar to many other people.

I use my system (two monitors) for business. I have data on one side of the screen and sometimes excel or word on the other screen. In addition (here's where 10/GUI could be useful) I'll have a pdf open in the background which i need to quickly scroll through ("in adobe, quickly!?" you ask?). With one hand on the mouse I can quickly zip through Morningstar data, and use my free hand (on the pad) to scroll through a document, then quickly zip back and forth, scrolling and zooming as necessary. Right now that's just using a mouse and it can be tiresome to move around with just that little pointer (especially morningstar! oh it would be nice to have a touch interface for that...)

Finally, I need to have a "document scroller" or whatever it is that I can resize and move around, as I find myself with documents that sometimes need to show different parts of their data on screen. Basically I need to be able to "undock" documents so i can use them effectively (like papers on an actual desktop) and then redock them when I'm done.

That would be a beautiful interface that I do feel would save me some time and frustration. I would buy that for my business.