That was fast!

Wasn't it not only a few months back that we first heard of multi touch technology, the iPhone and Jeff Han? I recently gave a lecture on touch technology at the University of Salzburg, Austria. I wanted to start my talk by going back to the roots. So I (image-)googled the word "touch" expecting to find images of mothers with babies or perhaps pornography. Instead my search returned pictures of devices equipped with touch technology - over 58,000,000.00 of them!! Has the word "touch" become synonomous with "touch technology"?

I am surprised how fast it trickled into the public conciousness, especially since touch technology only uses a small fraction of our actual sense of touch. The abilities to sense temperature, shape, degrees of softness, texture, pain or the position of your muscles and joints are not playing any part in touch technology so far. A slick surface provides little haptic feedback which for example makes typing difficult.

At this year's Cebit convention, T-Mobile had an multi-touch installation, that was part Minority Report, part Jeff Han Screen and part vertical MS Surface "wall". In this video people seem so bored with the content itself. In fact they are not dealing with the data at all. How long will it take for the novelty of scaling and turning objects to wear off? What kind of interesting public application could this offer?

Neurofeedback Gaming Interfaces

Lately I've noticed a renewed interest in neurofeedback interfaces. Yahoo News reported on "mind reading toys" and mentioned Silicon Valley gaming companies such as NeuroSky Inc and Emotiv Systems Inc.



Electroencephalography, or EEG, is the basis of these technologies. It measures the brain's electrical activity through electrodes placed on the scalp. Mostly these techiques are used in clinical contexts to help patients with migranes or kids who suffer from ADD. Beyond that there have communities obsessed with neurofeedback technologies since the 60s, claiming to achieve optimized mental performance.

Steven Johnson's book Mind Wide Open from 2005 describes his own encounter with neurofeedback devices. He says: "After the initial amazement had worn off while I was playing the space game at Seiden's office, I couldn't help noticing that I couldn't control the ship with nearly as much accuracy as I could have with a joystick or a keyboard. There's a fuzziness to interaction that would be unpleasant were I actually interested in having an efficient conversation with the computer."

and

"The almost unthinkable complexity of the brain's information network is necessarily compressed down to a crude language when a machine listens to the collective rhythms of brain waves through the skull."

NeuroSky is about to unveil a headset with brainwave "dry" sensors that won't require a conducting gel to pick up brain activity.



While looking futuristic and usable I wonder how much brain activity they will be able to pick up, when scientific instruments with a lot more sensors produce "crude" results.

Emotiv Systems Inc. "Project Epoc" headset resembles more the know EEG instruments and interface wirelessly with all gaming consoles.



The company's wiki states: "Emotiv uses proprietary, patented algorithms to formulate detections of activities from the reading of EEG signals. These detections can determine a user’s expressions, feelings and thoughts." Apparently the technology picks ups the player's muscle twitches and thus facial expressions. The player's character would smile in synch with the player or "react" to the player with a range of feelings like surprise or anger. In other words interaction with an artificial intelligence.

Last but not least I found a "brainwave dance performance" on youtube. There is an introduction on how the sensors attached to the dancer work followed by pretty bad dancing:)

The Emotional iPhone Experience

Mac owners always had a more emotional relationship to their machines. That it is a great accomplishment on the part of Apple's designers. I like looking at my MacBook Pro every day! Touching it, using it is a delight. To prove my gushiness isn't rare to find amoung Mac users I'd like you to take a look at this video by Jason Ponton, Editor of The MIT Technology Review. He explains what makes a beautiful machine and his enthusiasm is a great example for the kind of emotional bond I am talking about.



Cell phones are intimate machines. We carry them close to our bodies and use them primarily to communicate, they are connectors to the world around us. I have never built that emotional relationship with any of my cell phones ( I am on my 5th phone now) . The novelty of a new phone wears off after a couple of weeks. It becomes a mere tool I expect to work. Since its features a miserably integrated I don't bother to use them. I am still doing the same few things with my phone I have always done: calling, texting and entering data into the calendar and the address book. My personal feature wish list has not changed for years. I don't need more features just a few done the right way. Nothing but sad compromises so far....

I think the iPhone will create that emotional relationship.

Why?

The integration with my Mac will be perfect. The iPhone will behave like my computer. It will be its ultra portable extension.

It will feel great in my hand, the multi-touch interface will make it feel like a real extension of my body. I will be able to directly touch and manipulate the information!

The overall success of the iPhone may depend on how well it will integrate with the Windows machines. The exclusive provider deal with AT+T is also annoying. No matter how great the iPhone is, I will not change my current phone plan for it.

I guess...

ZUIs: Archy, Zenzui, iPhone and Deepfish

When I wrote the post about the Zenzui interface I wasn't aware of the fact that efforts have been made for a long time to develop ZUIs - Zooming User Interfaces. The idea is a desktop that is infinitely expandable in all directions, as well as zoomable to get an overview or to show detail. To my knowledge the Zooming User Interface is one part of "ARCHY", a proposed system for interacting with computers designed by Jef Raskin. He first described these ideas in his book The Humane Interface which was published in 2000.





Apple is making efforts in that direction with the introduction of virtual desktops called "Spaces" in the upcoming release of Leopard. The upcoming iPhone also uses a stylized form of ZUI. Since the iPhone will use Safari and the full web experience, Apple needed a way to pan through the information on a small screen and came up with double tapping to zoom in and out, as well as pushing/panning of the page with swipes of your finger.
Apparently Apple has beat Microsoft efforts in that area to the punch. Look at Microsoft's Deepfish (see Demo) technology. The similarities are obvious, although the navigation of the interface by joystick seems a bit clutsy.

It is always so interesting to me, that all these concepts have been around for a long while. Some companies - usually Apple - just implement them better. Then they are called innovators, but their ideas were never produced out of thin air. It's a process and many smart people have contributed.