Slashdot Mirror
New Goggles Offer Minority Report-Style Interface With Heads-Up Display
Lucas123 writes "A Taiwanese non-profit R&D organization is demonstrating a new heads-up type display that allows users to interact with the floating virtual screens using finger swipes. The new i-Air Touch technology from the Industrial Technology Research Institute is being developed for an array of devices, including PCs, wearable computers and mobile devices. The technology allows a user's hand to be free of any physical device such as a touchpad or keyboard for touch input. ITRI plans to license the patented technology to manufacturers. The company sees the technology being used in not only consumer arenas (video), but also for medical applications such as endoscopic surgery and any industrial applications that benefit from hands-free input."
I don't know.... iSomething? Something Air? Something Touch? None of those are quite Apply enough...
Minority Report featured huge wall-sized displays that everyone could see what you were interacting with and appreciate the subtle finesse and precision with which you operated.
With these, people will cut throw startled glances and cut wide arcs around the goggle wearing special needs person doing a bizarre mime routine while walking down the sidewalk.
The technology allows a user's hand to be free of any physical device
Oh yeah, I'll bet it does...
Apparently in the future everyone will have tremendous upper body strength. In all seriousness though, I consider the enumerable guys in my office building who insist on taking their business meetings all the way to the urinal via bluetooth. I can just imagine the sensory input overload being so overwhelming that they get mixed up, start waving their arms around and pee all over themselves and anyone within range.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Seriously have journalists never seen any other SF movie?
It's like the only movie that's ever had a futuristic interface in it at all.
The moment I see some mouthbreather mention minority report I stop caring about anything they've written.
So basically, the depth camera uses longitudinal chromatic aberration (the red green and blue colors are not in focus for the same distances). So it needs to have your finger well lighted at any time...
I see no problem with that at all...
There's a lot of push towards I/O systems that are more convenient for the manufacturers, but less so for the end consumer.
The first keyboards were heavy and had tactile feedback. If you fumbled a key typing in your password, you knew whether it entered because you could feel the "click". Nowadays the keyboard is lighter than a paperback and there's no feedback - accidentally brush a key with your finger and you have to look (for non-password text entry) or start over.
Twist knobs are highly intuitive, especially when coupled with feedback. Twist a knob and see the hands of the clock move, or see the numbers change. Control the speed natively, and if you go too far it's obvious how to back up. Nowadays we have buttons to tap, incrementing the count by 1 each time. Tap 50 times to set the minute display, and if you go too far you have to go all the way around again. This was done largely because buttons are easy to fabricate (using PCB contacts), not because they are inherently better.
Modern typing is done on the display (phone, surface), so not only don't you have tactile feedback you can't feel the boundaries of the keys, and your fingers mask the key display. And it's really tiny - in order to access all the keys you have to type extra keys that switch between keyboards (upper/lower/symbol). Again, it was done for ease of manufacturing, not ease of use.
Is the ribbon any easier than, for example, cascading menus? The problem with the Windows original menu system was that every application put their commands in the top-level Start->Programs folder, leading to start menus containing hundreds of links. (I take the time to move StartMenu command links into subfolders by type, which makes it much easier, but on my dad's computer it's impossible to find anything.)
Ever since minority report people have been touting the wonders of air-gesture input, and that it is the next "big thing", but is it better? (Actually, I remember it from Johnny Mnemonic, 7 years earlier.) Seems like this is just something that's easier to manufacture, but not easier to use. Sure, the customer will be able to do everything they could do with a mouse/keyboard, but more slowly, less conveniently, and with lots of frustration. That's an externality to the manufacturers, but it's better for them because they don't have to build in a touch interface. Probably [electrically] more reliable, too.
Is this really progress? I wonder what Edward Tufte would say about modern interfaces.
The first keyboards were heavy and had tactile feedback. If you fumbled a key typing in your password, you knew whether it entered because you could feel the "click".
If you pay attention that's not really how you type. You learn where keys are by muscle memory, not because they have a shape. When I'm typing if I'm doing it right I'm not feeling edges of keys, just keys depressing under my finger. And I notice mistakes on the screen, not from where my fingers hit.
Nowadays we have buttons to tap, incrementing the count by 1 each time. Tap 50 times to set the minute display, and if you go too far you have to go all the way around again.
We do? That sounds horrible. Just about anything I've ever used that has you set large sets of numbers just lets you type them directly.
Modern typing is done on the display (phone, surface), so not only don't you have tactile feedback you can't feel the boundaries of the keys, and your fingers mask the key display. And it's really tiny - in order to access all the keys you have to type extra keys that switch between keyboards (upper/lower/symbol). Again, it was done for ease of manufacturing, not ease of use.
Sorry, but I consider that wrong in lots of ways.
You have tactile feedback in that you can feel where you are in relation to the edge of the device. Also while your finger obscures the key pressing displays what the key is so you can see exactly what was hit. But touch typing is no harder than on a computer, because over time you learn where to press and also because predictive mechanisms correct most mistakes.
Also, the problem is inherently one of size. Touch screens are not "more convenient for the manufacturer". You have no idea how much software and hardware is involved to get a touch screen keyboard working well. A physical keyboard is just buttons. But the reason why touch screen keyboards are winning out in small form factors is because the are more convenient for the USER. As good as the Blackberry keyboard was, I hated using those tiny keys and the virtual keyboard on a touchscreen has larger keys - and also can tailor the keyboard to a task like entering numbers rather than having to deal with a row of tiny numbers on a tiny keyboard.
Is the ribbon any easier than, for example, cascading menus?
I don't like the ribbon much but yes, direct access is in fact easier than deeply nested menus.
Ever since minority report people have been touting the wonders of air-gesture input, and that it is the next "big thing", but is it better?
Even though I disagree with your core argument, I do agree with your conclusion. I'm not sure air-gesture input is better. But I think like all things, over time it will be folded into the mix as just another possible way to tell a computer what to do. I rank it slightly ahead of talking as a socially acceptable interface, although you probably look a bit crazier with the motion.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley