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?

Tactile Interaction with Mobile Devices

More and more our digital devices and computers are being equipped with sensors. Physical computing is here at last! Apple's labtops have a motion sensor, that picks up fast movement. If a labtop is being dropped, it will shut down the spinning hard drive instantly to prevent damage to it. The upcoming iPhone is going to be equipped with proximity sensors as well as a accelerometer that detect when the device is being rotated from portrait to landscape.

Beyond the commercial applications there is exiting research being done at the university level. Steven Brewster, Faraz Chohan and Lorna Brown from the University of Glasgow introduced and tested tactile vibrational feedback on touchscreen devices. Typically people would like to use their mobile devices to get work done on subways and busses. Entering data is prone to errors because of shaking vehicles and environmental noise. Auditory feedbacks as tested by Brewster improve usability, but add no benefit in noisy conditions. In this system successful and erroneous typing (double taps or slips) each produce a specific feedback that suggests a "smooth" (success) vs. a "rough"(error) sensation. The study showed significant usability improvement. It increased the amount of data entered by the user and more successful error correction.
More information can be found here.

Technologyreview.com reports today (05-16-07) that the "British Telecom tries to wed Nintendo Wii-style technology to a tablet PC". Tilting and rotating the tablet PC would let the user navigate the computer "Etch-A-Scetch" style. While studying for my Masters (1999) Han Gene Paik and I developed an email application prototype that used tilt sensors to navigate in a similar fashion. Our concept departed from the WIMP interface and suggested the on screen environment to be filled with water. Sorting, filtering and selecting the email objects felt like digging for gold nuggets.


"Liquid Mail" by Han Gene Paik and Dirk J. Platzek

Today these accelerometer sensors are a lot more sophisticated and very tiny. They are known as microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and are used for example for the iPod Sport Kit , a joined effort by Apple and Nike. Accelerometers are placed into special running shoes. A wireless connection transmits the information to the iPod.

Another exciting idea in the area of physical computing was just introduced at the Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems 2007, in San Jose, California: "Shoogle", - excitatory multimodal interaction on mobile devices has been developed by John Williamson, Rod Murray-Smith and Stephen Hughes. It also uses accelerometers to pick up user gestures in exchange for vibrotactile and audio feedback. The system produces feedback that - for example - feels like balls of different weights bouncing inside a box. From the sound and vibrotactile sensation a user is then able to distinguish length or urgency of a message. It is not necessary for the user to look at the device, which is great in situations where that is not appropriate. The idea takes advantage "of user's familiarity with the dynamics of processes in the physical world to present information in a natural and non-irritating manner". The highly recommended article can be found here.

Zenzui - Zooming User Experience and Business Model

Zenzui's user interface design has some merits - I would like to check it out. The content seems to be like widgets, rather than a navigational system for real phone applications like email, calendar etc.
I like the tiles' conceptual extention past the boundaries of the users screen resolution. Zooming in and out seems intuitive. Instead of scrolling, which on "non-iPhone" phones is cumbersome to do, they have small interface elements let you navigate in 4 directions or else zoom in or out (essentially opening and closing of widgets/apps/files).



The Zenzui business model aims to satisfy consumers, marketers, advertisers, developers and mobile operators, which means it will be a system filled with ad-crap.

In the video below zenzui sometimes seems latent and slow. The Zenzui interface has the potential to be a direct touch interface (like the iPhone it doesn't really need hardware buttons), but bends to so many different mobile manufacturers that the user experience is largely uncontrollable.

Jeff Han at TED 2006

I've posted on multitouch technology before, but watching Jeff Han from the NYU Research Lab in NY talk about their research just adds another layer. The demo shows him manipulating data and objects with his hand and fingers using a variety of gestures. Rarely have I seen a more convincing way of Human Computer Interaction. It makes complete sense right away and makes you wish time would fly so we could all use machines like that.

Designer's Outpost

This got me interested for a hot minute. It looked like an interesting approach to combine analog and digital interfaces in a collaborative setting. But after watching the entire video I feel that the inventors of the system are to precious with the scribbled data. I guess I didn't really understand the need to turn the post-its into digital form, especially since the usable space on the surface seems very limited. The suggestion to keep working on the scanned notes is not convincing to me, the follow up software clunky.

Watch a video here: http://guir.berkeley.edu/projects/outpost/video/Outpost.asx