This screen looks fantastic. If you don’t see what the fuss is about, think what the implications could be for the form factor of the Nintendo DS, or the iPod. As they get bigger, which they inevitably will, imagine what that will mean for displays at home and at work. Bill Buxton is saying that large multi-touch displays will be cheaper to install than whiteboards. I have to agree.
Update: check out Jeff’s full reading list.
Over at Coding Horror Jeff Atwood has been cajoling developers to learn more about visual design and to learn a graphics tool. He’s focussed on visual design in these two posts and I agree with him that these are critical skills for anyone doing anything with a visible UI.
But it strikes me that he might want to push further; looking at what value there would be for developers in knowing more about other human-factors design disciplines. At the risk of pre-empting him I’d like to see everyone read these few books:
The Inmates Are Running The Asylum by Alan Cooper.
This is a great read. It’s a rant by Interaction Design guru Alan Cooper on why developers shouldn’t be trusted to do any kind of design work and why the design has to be cast in stone before developers are allowed to touch it.
Knowing how bad many developers are basic interaction design he makes a good case; I would prefer to see us get better at it than allow Alan to cut us out of the process altogther. This book should give you the motivation to learn more about your users.
The design of everyday things by Don Norman.
This classic text points out all those niggling little annoyances that we face every day as we pull at a door that should be pushed, or dribble tea on the table from a tea pot that doesn’t pour properly.
Theses usability issues dog our day-to-day lives yet could be solved by paying just a little more attention to what you’re designing.
Failing those two, which give you fantastic background and insight into this area, if you only read one book, and you need it to be short, Spolsky would have you read his…
User interface design for programmers by Joel Spolsky.
We read this a few months back as one of our book club books (we have a geek book club at work). It’s short, very easy to read and gives you concrete dos and don’ts for making life easier for your users.
It includes wonderful reviews of some of the best and worse of Microsoft’s interfaces and explains stuff in Joel’s usual no-nonsense style. You should totally read this one.
I hope Jeff points us to some more as well.
http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=j_han
This is the same kind of stuff we’ve seen from Jeff Han before, but it’s great to hear giving a rapid summary of the uses.
Electronic Paper. I don’t mean the kind of rubbish we see today from Sony, the iRex iLiad or even the Amazon Kindle. I mean sheets of paper, that require no power, where you turn the pages with your hands. Like real paper, but you can replace the content.
Xerox Parc were working on it, along with 3M, but closed it down in 2005 and have been seeking partners to license the technology. Philips were working on on it too, and early this year spun a company off from its research labs – Polymer Vision. Readius is their shiny little display, but how long before they produce a USB compatible book?
The book format matters because it doesn’t need power. If you only have a single sheet you need memory and power to update the screen. If you replace the screen with pages then you supply the power and each page is its own memory – it’s a very clever form factor that old book.
I wrote last week about the increasing visibility of multi-touch UIs, most recently with Apple’s iPhone. This week I’ve found some more to share…
Ksan Lab have a nice demo of Virtual Painter up on YouTube giving a nice view of the natural style of interaction allowed by these devices. The gestures used here are different to those seen in some of the other demos. It (or the demonstrator) seems to favor single-finger use.
Here’s another great demo that combines touch with physical tokens to give a great Conservation Lab demo, it seems to be pitching at a Point of Information styles application.
Then, of course, there’s TouchTable which is much larger than a lot of what we’ve seen and is designed around a shared experience – I can imagine this having huge potential in so many applications from meetings (war rooms) and team gaming either co-operative or not.
But if it’s large that you want then iBar should be up your street. It’s not too clever, having a rather limited display repertoire, but still the size is impressive.
Lemur from JazzMutant is designed specifically as a medi controller, so the dispaly is geared to ui artefacts rather than a desktop, but the different types of interactions are impressive. That’s being shown off here in one mode and here as a sequencer.
Natural Interaction are also showcasing stuff like an interactive table called tabulaTouch, showing tabulaMaps. They stick to a lot fo the more common UI gestures that we’ve been seeing (I must find some names for them). They also have a Minority Report style UI.
Then there’s the Diamond Touch work that allows simultaneous multi-user touch input and looks very slick again – this time working with a fairly standard OS interface. There’s a nice touch when the team “accidentally” spill the coke on the screen. Diamond Touch comes out of MERL, so stands a good chance of hitting the shelves.
But of course there’d be no show without Punch, and I finally found some touch UI work from Microsoft, coming on VIsta Tablets. I could have cried watching Hilton Locke demoing this; the cursor doesn’t stick with your finger! Even doing the demo is broken. Apparently people new to touch input will find it really intuitive ’cause “pretty much everyone uses a two button mouse”. That’s right, they’ve put a finger controlled mouse on screen! That sucks in so many ways I just can’t start.
So, the Apple iPhone makes a big deal of its multi-touch gesture interface. I can see why, it’s pretty slick, but there have been larger, desktop scale, demos of this kind of thing around for a while.
A lot of them look like they’re getting close to saleable. TactaDraw, from Tactiva looks amazing, and is a showcase of their TactaPad hardware – they seem to have some industrial design work left to do on the device.
Perceptive Pixel are planning to market “the most advanced multi-touch system in the world” and judging by this excellent video they’re not bragging too much. The product comes out of earlier work.
Reactable, on the other hand uses devices rather than gestures, they have an introductory video, a basic demo and a free improvisation example.
I’m interested in this kind of thing partly for work and partly for play. You can imagine the possibilities of DJing with this stuff. Final Scratch already integrates traditional decks with MP3 DJing and there are other hardware devices too, I own a Behringer BCD2000.
With cheap, modular components it’s inevitable that a plethora of physical devices are around, including real interesting ones like this LED Mixer.
But the multi-touch gesture interfaces have the potential to make all of these obsolete. Imagine the interface you could create using those Reactable controls, with a handfule of “records” that you could instantly assign any MP3 to? Or a large version of the TactaPad, with virtual decks on screen – an obvious way to work.
The world of gaming often benefits from devices like this first and World of Warcraft is an obvious target. This example combines multi-touch gesture commands with voice recognition to command forces quickly and accurately.
If you were wondering why Vista has invested so much in completely re-engineering the UI model and going true 3D, or why OSX did the same and why the Linux community have built Beryl, this is why. We are on the brink of seeing some really good physical interaction capabilities coming out.
I wonder what might become possible if we combined some of this with RFID and Physical World Hyperlinks?
But on a lighter note, we’ll all need to beef up.
By the way, if this stuff interests you, we’re looking for an interaction designer.
The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) Project has releases Human Interface Guidelines for the machine.
This is a great piece of thinking and is, aongst other things, the first really good application of Fitts Law that I’ve seen.
I was going to write some stuff up about it, but Mikes Journal has done a great job already.
If you’re into Interaction Design, you might want to follow Nadeem’s occasional ramblings too.
As he says, we are currently looking for talent in this area.