The Ultimate Dual-Hand Touchscreen 275
LithiumX writes "This morning I saw a
video demonstration of the most interesting input technology I've seen for a long time. This is a touch-screen that accepts inputs from multiple (I saw at least 8) points at once. It seems very responsive, the display is large and of decent resolution, and they actually wrote software to take advantage of it.
It appears to be entirely research
at the moment. I'd offer up organs for one of these things."
Re:Touchscreen keyboards (Score:3, Informative)
While applications like this have been around before, most of the time they still had to be controlled with a special hardware-device: And it's very cool to see they now succeeded in bringing it to only be controlled by the fingers.
Vastly different than Touchscreen keyboards (Score:5, Informative)
What's special is that it can sense more than one point of contact at once. In fact not just "more than one" but "any number of" points of contact in parallel. It's a totally different ball game than standard touch screens. A typical touch screen only reports one X,Y position at a time (like a mouse), which is typically the average of the points of contact (depending on the pressure, and the type of touch screen of course).
-Don
Lemur++? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Vastly different than Touchscreen keyboards (Score:4, Informative)
That's not actually special when you're talking about some keyboards. I am typing this right now on a Fingerworks Touchstream LP, which is based on this technology. To type a single letter, you make one contact on the touchpad. To move your mouse, you put down two fingers simultaneously and move them. To click and drag, you use three fingers. To scroll, four. It also understands five-finger combinations and tracks movements, processing them as interactive "gestures" that can be mapped to functionality like opening, closing, saving, zooming, etc. This company was sadly bought out by some third party (rumored to be Apple or Wacom), who took the technology but has not kept up the line of keyboards. Apple's recent announcement makes me believe that they may have been the buyer.
Myron Krueger's Videodesk System (Score:3, Informative)
Here's a description of Myron Krueger's classic Videodesk system, from Jakob Nielson's CHI'88 Trip Report [useit.com] (in which he also described our presentation of pie menus).
-Don
Videodesk: Computing on the Desktop
Current marketing trends in the personal computer business emphasize "desktop this" and "desktop that" - desktop publishing, desktop presentations, desktop video, desktop CAD... as a catch phrase for doing things on small, desktop computers. It is also possible, however, to actually do computing on the desktop itself. This was demonstrated by Myron Krueger from the Artificial Reality Corporation in the Videodesk system: Videodesk consists of a large surface over which you move your arms, hands, and fingers. A video camera mounted over the desk picks up these movements and use them as input to the computer which then shows then as an outline on the display. This display is currently separate from the desktop surface but one might imagine that a future system would feel even more natural to the user by having the output display projected directly onto the input surface.
Several applications were shown. One of the most immediately understandable was a finger painting system where the color used was determined by the number of fingers shown. I asked Krueger why the system deposited the paint over the user's finger rather than under it which might have seemed more natural. His answer was that sometimes one would not want the hand to obscure the work being drawn.
The painting was cleared by spreading all fingers. Some of these gestures seemed very natural, including the clearing gesture. Gestures in other applications were not that obvious but still frequently very nice, such as having a straight line appear between two fingertips in a CAD-system. One problem they had in developing their gestural language was in parsing hand movements to determine when you just want to move your hand to another part of the screen and when you want to issue a command. In general, there seemed not to be much consistency in the interaction techniques used in the different parts of the system with the exception of the technique of reaching to the upper right corner of the screen to pull out the main menu.
Videodesk is really a special version of the older Videoplace system where the computer is an entire room which you enter to use your body as input device. As such, Videodesk was yet another example of the evolutionary trend at this CHI. The full Videoplace system was not available for the conference as it was installed as part of a large exhibit on Computers and Art at the IBM Building in New York. This was a very interesting exhibition which I had seen by accident before coming to Washington: I had originally jumped on the M2 bus to go uptown to the Metropolitan Museum when I looked out the window and saw a poster at the IBM Building for their special exhibition. Yet another advantage of not using a constrained "transport interface" like the subway: You can change your mind.
Re:Vastly different than Touchscreen keyboards (Score:3, Informative)
I've owned a multiple input touchscreen for some months now called the Lemur.
http://www.cycling74.com/products/lemur [cycling74.com]
The Lemur *is* special, as not only do you get multiple inputs, you also get them fast enough to perform with, and loads of presets for music apps.
Re:Vastly different than Touchscreen keyboards (Score:3, Informative)
Multi-point gesture interfaces go back a whole lot further than 2001. What's so special and original about Diamond Touch? Other than the obvious advantage s of being built out of modern technology, how does it compare with Myron Krueger's [siggraph.org] work [ctheory.net], which [jtnimoy.com] goes [medienkunstnetz.de] back [wikipedia.org] to [useit.com] 1969 [artmuseum.net]?
-Don
Re:Drivers (Score:1, Informative)
All the parameter communication is OSC (open sound control) which is well supported in the open source world.
The thing probably runs linux itself.
Re:Minority Report (Score:3, Informative)
Ouch, sorry to hear that. Sounds like you need to lower your keyboard: in the rest position, there should be no strain in your arms or shoulders. If you feel you're raising your shoulders in the rest position, your keyboard/desk surface is too high.
Unfortunately, desk surface height is rarely adjustable. The trick then is to get a higher chair. Note that your legs shouldn't be hanging, so you may also need something under your feet to rest them on (for the correct height: your thighs should be horizontal).