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Microsoft Buys Multi-Touch Pioneer Perceptive Pixel
theodp writes "Back in 2006, a post on Jeff Han's multi-touch screen technology — a real TED crowd-pleaser — gave Slashdot readers a taste of the iPhone and iPad future. Han spun off his NYU Research into a company called Perceptive Pixel which, among other things, gave the world CNN's Amazing Magic Wall. On Monday, Steve Ballmer announced that Microsoft is acquiring Perceptive Pixel, which not only means you'll be able to run Windows 8 on an 82-inch touchscreen, but that the Apple v,. Motorola Mobility lawsuit is about to get more interesting!"
If by "more interesting" you mean "more tedious, unnecessary and annoying", then yes, yes it will.
Congratulations to Microsoft!
Now we know at least one thing Windows 8 will run on. Woo Hoo.
Vietnam Veteran / Former Postal Worker -- Use Caution When Taunting!
I use my Tablet PC comfortably cradled in one arm, or propped comfortably on a table or desk.
For the tactile feedback, there're a number of companies working on this, most recent I came across:
http://senseg.com/technology/senseg-technology
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Who took them away from you? There's plenty of phones with buttons, plenty of feature phones, and if you really want to get medieval, you can even find phones that can barely text. How about you stop trying to stifle things you don't understand?
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
No more relevant than my patent on peanut butter and jelly bagels. Microsoft v Motorola Mobility, though, that could be something.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Given all the stink Apple makes about its multi-touch patents, you'd have thought that they invented multi-touch. I guess they just patented USING multi-touch. I'm not sure if there is a term for this class of patents, but if not, then I suggest "constrictor patent". The patent covers integrating someone else's invention (wrapping it) and then suffocates anyone who attempts to also integrate that technology. For another example, look at Apple's patent on using inductive charging in computing and portable devices. This practice not only harms Apple's competitors, it also harms the inventor of the original technology since Apple is the only company that is able to legally use the technology without risk of being sued. The patent office really needs to stop offering these patents as well as revoke all of the constrictor patents that were already granted.
Microsoft have never got this, and they probably never will. First they tried to turn phones into Windows desktops with a start button, now they're trying to turn Windows into a smartphone.
Haven't Microsoft figured out yet that humans need tactile feedback for any kind of prolonged operation, and aren't designed for holding our hands out from our body?
I take it you aren't a teacher. I write on a 200 inch vertical surface with no tactile feedback for 2 hours at a time. This thing would be amazing in my classroom.
I just bought a smartphone with a slideout keyboard seven months ago. It has great tactile feedback, as I mostly got it for email (the only 'smart' thing I really got the phone for anyway). And yes, you can dial numbers from the slideout keypad - the learning curve is only a tiny bit sharper than a traditional 'dumb' phone for making calls on tactile feedback alone. It sounds like you just suck at shopping around to find exactly what you want.
If they can try to get some credibility they can try to get some validity behind patents on multi-touch and in doing so undermine Apple and Google.
However as was pointed out at the time, Hans work was not new, when he did his pinch zoom projects in 2002, (his TED talk wasn't till 2006, he started long before Apple) all of those gestures had previously been done in the preceding 30 years of research by others.
However that doesn't matter to Microsoft, they just want some patents and some fake cred to fight on their way down. Ballmer has nothing buy games like this.
Actually calling via the phone is terrible. The quality is crap, the latency all over the place, their is no video, and it still wants to be synchronous.
I agree multitouch is pointless for full size screens, but having a computer with me at all times is very useful. Tactile buttons reduce the screen size, which is a far bigger hindrance since phone calls are a tiny part of what these devices due.
That's the only thing Microsoft knows how to do well - copying innovation and if they can't, try to hindering it.
Posting as AC to avoid shills affecting my Karma.
When I was young, we had text screens and you needed to basically be literate to "do stuff" with text, capable of abstract thought and reasoning. That was OK, only us elite used computers anyway.
Then we had to squander processing power and programmer effort to make everything GUI graphical to make it as simple as possible for illiterate noobs and damn the productivity collapse to the literate. But, hey, at least I get a nice screen and when I'm allowed to use old fashioned "text" instead of incomprehensible icons, pretty fonts for my text. Modern display technology can be pretty nice!
Now we have to cover those nice screens and pretty fonts with an encrustation of smeared finger grease.
I'm not overly fond of most UI work done since the mid 1980s.
I don't think the decline of: ... de-evolution.
1) Must be able to read and write and memorize text. To:
2) Must be able to understand hieroglyphic pictograms and memorize muscle memory of GUI menus and icons. To:
3) Must be able to play with virtual playdough and virtual fingerpaints and memorize nothing because we're taking features away now
is evolution. More like
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Devo was ahead of the curve.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Give me my tactile phone buttons back, please, so I can make calls when I can't see (yes, some of us use our phones for calling. I know, amazing concept and it's wonderful what new technology can do.) And stop trying to make everything into a smartphone.
You know, if you can't see, just *speak* to your phone, and tell it to call who you want to call.
Oh I'm so sorry that things are changing for you, it'd be so much better if things stayed the same for eternity!
Exactly. People want smart phones with touchscreen. People who want just buttons are in minority. Microsoft isn't doing this for the PC only. Not that it wouldn't be good on PC in addition to keyboard and mouse.
I take it you aren't a teacher. I write on a 200 inch vertical surface with no tactile feedback for 2 hours at a time. This thing would be amazing in my classroom.
I take it you are a teacher. Cause no one else would fail to see that using multi-touch on an 84" screen means waving both arms around. But since you claim it'll be amazing for you, I wish you good luck. Except that I think that 3-4 months of salary could be better spent on other things our schools lack. Like teachers.
“By joining Microsoft, we will be able to take advantage of the tremendous momentum of the Microsoft Office Division, tightly interoperate with its products, and deliver this technology to a very broad set of customers.”
Right, because what I wanted for an input device for my word processing and spreadsheet applications is an 80" display that has no keyboard or mouse and relies on multitouch. Oh and if I was going to buy a Perceptive Pixel product, I'd really like it to be tightly integrated and optimized with a particular operating system instead of deciding on my own what is best for my needs. I think by "broad set of customers" he meant "now just Windows users or whatever Microsoft wants me to say as I laugh all the way to the bank." I mean Perceptive Pixel currently supports "C, C++, C#, Java, Windows XP, 7, Linux in both 32- and 64-bit architectures." How long before that's just MS Visual Studio and Windows?
My work here is dung.
Never really understood how they make it so hard. It's just a UI that needs action or dos commend connected to a sub sub sub sub sub menu or a direction / pintch / sub menu of some sort. I'm sure excel could work on my phone. Just have to get away from it being used and interacted with like a desktop. :)
The bigger question is WHY am I trying to use a phone to work excel!
We don't lack teachers, we lack will and motivation.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So, if this thing is tough enough, it could be laid flat on the floor and someone can write a Twister game for it...
I think I use less than 100 minutes a month worth of actual voice communication with my phone. Text, chat, and email have pretty much completely replaced the need to have voice conversation; the only person I actually talk to on the phone is my mother, and even she is getting on the text bandwagon, now that she has finally gotten herself a cellphone.
Some people see it as a bad thing that we're not literally talking to one another like we used to, but honestly, I don't see it as a bad thing at all. When I get a phone call, it not only interrupts me but it interrupts everyone around me while I take that call. When I get a text message I can quickly respond without stopping all the conversation happening right in front of me, without having to leave the room or find a quiet place. Honestly, I see that as much more rude than just shooting off a text.
Besides, there's another thing with tactile buttons: they collect dirt and debris and serve as an avenue for that dirt and debris to get into your device. My touchscreen smartphone is much more easily cleaned then the dumbphones of old.
Cause no one else would fail to see that using multi-touch on an 84" screen means waving both arms around.
Yeah, I'm failing to see that, especially since I'm watching it in use and don't see the guy waving around both arms. With your use of the word "waving" you're trying to convey this wild flailing motion, but the actual interaction with the device seems as natural as what I would do on a chalk board.
Controlling a large work PC screen ain't it.
That depends...at least for me...if you give me a 23" in front of me and another 23" right in the table I'm all in! Well, at least if I can configure the system to work, like switching the touchscreen in the desk from input, to mirror to...arrr...what was the name? Stand-alone-display? Extended Desktop? Multihead?
You know, if you can't see, just *speak* to your phone, and tell it to call who you want to call.
Yes, we all know how reliable voice recognition is.
Let's set so double the killer delete select all.
Figures I've seen shows that north of 75% of all calls made on devices with voice assisted dialling are made without using voice assisted dialling. Why? Because it's so darn unreliable, as anyone who's had a phone can attest to.
"Call mom"
"Calling Ron"
"No, not RON, dammit, call MOM."
"Calling ENRON. Sorry, the number you dialled can not be reached"
"Em Oh Em for god's sake"
"Calling Imoen Ferguson"
"Abort, abort. Call plus four seven two two [...]"
"I am sorry, I did not understand that"
"Dial plus four seven two two [...]"
"Sorry, Beaufort S Evan not recognized. Do you want to add an entry?"
The whole point of using buttons with tactile feedback is so there won't be any mistakes.
Not unlike what they did with MSN in the olden days (The Microsoft Network). They developed a copycat product to what AOL, Prodigy, Genie, Compuserve etc. had brought to market ages ago. They tried making the internet look like Windows, and then later had to backtrack and try to make Windows look more like the internet.
I assume your 200 inch vertical surface is a chalk board (unless they have come up with some new tech I haven't heard of) and you say that you get no tactile feedback. I think your using it wrong!
"The bigger question is WHY am I trying to use a phone to work excel! :)"
The same thing 99% of the people are doing with it: grocery lists, people lists, anything but calculating, not even a fucking sum!
Wait, "Perceptive Pixel" is not an Ubuntu release?
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
You know how I can tell you didn't read the patents?
I owned one of the FingerWorks keyboards. Their gesture-recognition technology seemed like it had been reverse-engineered from UFOs, or brought back by a time-traveler from the far future. It was enormously more advanced than the work Buxton cites, not to slight Bill in any way (he was a big influence on my own doctoral work in HCI).
I only hope that Microsoft does a better job of popularizing Han's advanced features. Apple still has barely begun to exploit the good parts of FingerWorks' gestural technology. (Can I at least get some two- and three-finger gestures to do usable text selection and editing commands?)
unless they have come up with some new tech I haven't heard of
Yes, the marker board, also known as the white board. It has very low friction compared to a chalk board. Either way, a multi-touch screen like this could mimic the same friction as either a white or chalk board, providing the same level of tactile feedback. I have a tablet PC with a stylus, and I can insert different tips, and depending on how much drag I want the pen to have it can feel like writing with a pen or a pencil. Same idea could be used here.
Hmmm, but you don't work at the whiteboard/chalkboard to be individually productive. You do it in order to be seen from a distance without technological assistance.
Would you choose to do the rest of your work on a vertical 200" workspace? I doubt it.
Oh, and I am amazed that you have purchased non-tactile chalk... does it exude an anesthetic?
Touchscreens are tactile... you touch them.
Yeah, I'm failing to see that, especially since I'm watching it in use and don't see the guy waving around both arms.
The hand waving starts at around 2:38
Sorry that disagreeing with you is shilling, I'll be sure to visit MS offices and pickup the paycheck they apparently owe me.
I've yet to figure out why they didn't just move buttons to the back -- chorded or otherwise. I've seen a few companies playing around with more touch screens on the back, but never an otherwise close to competitive phone with buttons on the back. You can even fit two or three fingers from each hand on there whilst comfortably holding the thing.
Maybe it's time someone made a peripheral (or linked to one if it already exists).
Another useful feature would be a tutorial/training mode where the buttons touch/soft pressure sensitive and showed you the position of the finger(s) and letter/button you're pressing before you fully pressed it.
So research paid for by the public got stolen and used to spin-off a company that's now being sold to Microsoft.
So how much of the purchase price will NYU and the US public see? Or will these blatant theft go un- noticed?
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
You do it in order to be seen from a distance without technological assistance. Would you choose to do the rest of your work on a vertical 200" workspace? I doubt it.
So what's your point exactly? Different tools for different jobs? Okay, that's obvious.
Are you retarded? I have used speech recognition on the Droid X for a year and a half now and it has NEVER gotten what I said wrong. This is without training the phone and frequently with words I'm shocked it knew what they were, not to mention how to spell them. Get with the times gramps, or see a speech therapist; just do something.
Ah, so occasional slight gestures moving mostly just your hands is your idea of "waving both arms around." Hyperbole much? I was expecting something more like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlJM4UhbQ7A
Are you retarded? I have used speech recognition on the Droid X for a year and a half now and it has NEVER gotten what I said wrong.
No, not retarded. I have something you'll never have: a deep voice.
I would love a phone with a touchscreen but on which I can also feel the buttons. Haptics, dynamic morphing, whatever, I don't care how they do it.
30+ small children in a class is too many for effective learning
;-)
ever heard of projecting an ipad's screen to the wall instead of using the wall? No need to use both arms with projection technology! lol!
i think you should describe how your teaching methodology would change (for the better) if you were using an active surface vs a marker board vs a projected pc/tablet image.
i think it would be cool... but then i am just a geek :)
+1 funny
Microsoft didn't invent DOS, from wikipedia:
MS-DOS was a renamed form of 86-DOS – informally known as the Quick-and-Dirty Operating System or Q-DOS[3] – owned by Seattle Computer Products, written by Tim Paterson.[3] Microsoft needed an operating system for the then-new Intel 8086 but it had none available, so it bought 86-DOS for $75,000 and licensed it as its own then released a version of it as MS-DOS 1.0
Microsoft didn't invent Windows either, from wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_1.0 [wikipedia.org]
The history of Windows dates back to September 1981, when the project named "Interface Manager" was started. It was first presented to the public on November 10, 1983,[4] renamed to "Microsoft Windows"; the two years of delay before release led to charges that it was "vaporware". The initially announced version of Windows had features so much resembling the Macintosh interface that Microsoft had to change many of them
Microsoft didn't invent the Kinect either, from wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PrimeSense [wikipedia.org]
The company provides 3D sensing technology for Kinect, previously known as Project Natal.
If you are a long term user of KDE, then you would know how many things Microsoft actually cloned from KDE:
- clickable items in the location bar on file explorer.
- device center (http://polishlinux.org/reviews/kde-4-rev-790000/kde4_790000_device.jpg)
- the whole feeling of windows 7 resembles KDE (which was release much before) (http://www.internetling.com/2008/12/29/windows-7-the-kde-3-5-wannabe/)
And these are just on top of my head! Do you really want me to go on?
How come parent was modded down? He was only quoting information from non-biased sources (like wikipedia). Things like this only proves that this place is in fact crowded with Microsoft shills.
It's the difference between talking on the phone and talking face to face. With a projected tablet PC, I'm not in front of the screen pointing to things. The best I can do is scribble on the screen with ink for emphasis, but I don't have any other gestures and nonverbal communication at my disposal. And all that scribbling gets the screen very messy. Further, I have to write very large because the pen nub isn't fine enough, so I can't leave things up on the board; I have to erase as I move along.
Standing up in front of the objects I'm manipulating is very different, because I can communicate nonverbally by pointing and so forth. I could also write larger, and keep things on the board longer to reference later.
Oh I forgot to address how it would be better than a regular chalk/marker board. Remember the US/World map that used to be rolled up above the blackboard, that you would pull down during geography class? That would now be integrated into the board like Google map, except you can zoom in to any place for a geography lesson.
Or have you ever had a teacher say "I'm a terrible artist, but I'll give it a shot" maybe in math class when drawing 3D objects? With a surface like this, those could be pre-loaded and instead of a crappy drawing made by "not an artist" you get a fully accurate rendering of a toroid or hypercube or whatnot.
Or imagine writing an equation on the screen, and it being recognized. Then you could pull up plots of the equation, and maybe adjust parameters to show how it changes in x and y. Maybe it could query things like Wolfram Alpha so you get its derivative, its integral, etc.
Let's take it a step further: turn everyone's desk into an interactive surface. I used to have a math class where everyone would come to the board and put answers up. You could instead write at your interactive desk, and then display the classes answers on the interactive board at once. Or the students could have copies of the board at the same time on their desk so kids in the back can see just as well. The lecture could be recorded automatically, and they could play it back step by step to see a correct derivation or proof along with an audio explanation.
I could go on and on. I don't know how effective all this would really be honestly, but I'm a geek too and think it could be cool.
Why the hell do you think a multi-touch screen requires waving 2 hands around? I use my iPad one-handed, and millions of people use smartphones with only one hand as well.
I think you're in desperate need of some education yourself. Try a critical thinking class.
You are an idiot.
Why the hell do you think a multi-touch screen requires waving 2 hands around? I use my iPad one-handed, and millions of people use smartphones with only one hand as well.
Your iPad and the smartphones aren't 58" as per TFA.
Using multi-touch gestures a couple of inches in size isn't useful on a display that is intended to be seen from across the room. Even if you were Paganini, you'd need two hands and arms waving.