Interfaces, metaphors & multi-touch

http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2006/08/28/interface_problems/1.html

 

1st, a nice companion to this article is "In The Beginning Was The Command Line" by Neal Stephenson.

Second - If voice recognition is in its infancy, and I agree with you that you can't say it has progressed beyond that, that's an infant with some serious developmental disabilities.... I mean seriously - what is it - a ten or fifteen year old infant? That's just depressing.

 

Interesting article.
I'll still stick with my keyboard and mouse. They may be useless for 3D manipulation, but for 2D they rock.

3D desktops are hard for the novice to understand anyway.

 

I used a iBar interface once, atleast I think it was. It was at a chocolate museum in Germany on the Rhine if I rember. The only thing with having a projector projecting from behing you is that you have to stand to the side of the display to read whats on the screen.

 

A trackball thing would be the perfect extra control for source forts - the problem would be moving your hand from keyboard to ball and back. Great article with some very interesting insights

 

I had a PC game controller years ago called the Space Orb, I think. It had a ball on it that allowed for 6 degree movement. It could be pushed, pulled, lifted, depressed, turned, twisted, tilted, etc. I don't have it anymore, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't $500.
http://www.mindflux.com.au/products/spacetec/sorb360.html

Also, WoW != Warcraft 3.

 

Some of Jeffs other work is very interesting too. Such as this multi touch LED array.


*random tidbit of the day* in Minority Report they used a gestural-recognition interface developed by John Underkoffler while at MIT.
link

 

Voice Recognition is great in Wnidows Vista... so what. You need to have silent environment, or else all the efforts become useless.

You'd need voice recognition that would listen to the specific user. And that is so far out into the future.

 

it's possible to use a combination of two microphones on a beam arrangement and some software to effectively get a directional mike. Not perfect but still a useful external noise filter

 

I'm not convinced the iBar (crap name, btw) is a touchscreen. If you watch the video, you can see patches of light where people's arms cross the bar without touching it. Kind of looks more like a series of sensors above the bar rather than a touch screen (having worked in bars, and knowing how messy and sticky they get by the end of the night, I'm not sure a touchscreen would work that long anyway!)

The Jeff Han stuff was way cool, the cynic in me says that I don't think it'll ever become mainstream though...

 

command line is still the fastest if you can be bothered to learn how to use it.

 

Bob isn't dead, he's alive and well in Windows XP as the default animated character (now called Rover) in Search... which thankfully you can turn off.

 

I quite like the interface shown in Jeff's demonstration. It seems almost perfect for any usage, as it's like controlling paper. Much more intuitive and flexibly manageable than a mouse & keyboard; for 2D, and 3D!

 

very interesting article, maybe we will have a UI like in minority report some day soon

also, there is a big typo in this article

It is a Warcraft 3 Demo, not a World Of Warcraft demo (this was pointed out above also it seems)

 

More like about $30,--. At one point PC World in the UK was giving them away as a freebie with the game "Forsaken" (remember that one? It was a "Descent" clone) with which it worked rather well. I got one then.

Drivers were never developed for Windows XP because it was discontinued before then, but it soon gathered a cult following and some enterprising geeks programmed their own. They work quite well and I use the SpaceOrb for Quake and UT2003 .

 

Few mistakes I saw.

This is a very good article, I learned from it. Not only could these multitouchscreens be used for computers and such, think about a new wave in musical instruments!




-CollinstheClown

 

Yeah, for some stuff -
but at the same time shortcut keys are pretty damn fast if you can be bothered to learn how to use them.

For instance - Let's you and I both start in our starting point - you at c:\ and me on a windows desktop - and we both delete a file in the default location for files on a windows XP computer: "My Documents" (C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents\)

We will both delete a file called "trash.bmp" I hit tab once to get to "My Documents" - then hit enter. I then click on "trash.bmp" and hit shift+delete. Who's faster?

Don't get me wrong, the command line is mucho powerful for lots of stuff, but it's certainly not the "fastest" in many cases.

(At the same time, if I want to run word, excel, charmap, mspaint, cmd, etc... I do it by hitting windows key+r and just typing in the name of the app I want instead of clicking on the start menu etc... This is a hybrid between gui and cli - and this hybrid is much faster than either of the other two)

 

the command line can be faster for some things, but in general the GUI is more useful, however the command line is still used for many things

 

Great article.

 

No mention of BumpTop

When thinking of a inovative way to use the "classic" desktop in a modern way the following innovation comes to mind. I think with the proper developement this might be a winner.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0ODskdEPnQ

Edit: just a thought, combine this with a Wiimote like controler