What comes after touch?

Nice blog post on some thinking of what is next for interfaces - www.buzzfeed.com/tommywilhelm/what-comes-after-the-touchscreen

Gesture tracking, 3D mapping of gestures and movement, etc - the view seems to be that is where we are heading.

But what are we trying to do?  What tasks are we trying to conduct with these interfaces? What are the applications doing?  Presumably we are not writing documents or other similar day-to-day tasks.

Perhaps it is an interesting route for uses where you don't want or can't actually touch a screen - like the example of surgeons given in the blog.

People will figure out uses for these technologies.  Touch spent years doing little but spinning and zooming photographs but now with the hardware of smartphones and tablets we have found real value.  Gesture hasn't yet had much of an outing other than for game play which is a short, occasional task - not a day long job.

Minority Report at 10

Very few films have had such an influence on ideas and thinking around interaction design as Minority Report has.  In almost every discussion about the next steps in interfaces someone references the gestural interaction shown in the film along with many of the other technologies used in it.

There have been several articles published in the news and on blogs recently as this is the 10th anniversary of the film's release but this is one of the better ones we thought...have a read

http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/21/minority-report-at-10-a-look-at-technology-from-today-to-2054/#continued

Military touchscreen applications

We keep looking for applications of multi-touch that go beyond spinning photos around and zooming in and out. We came across this article about a product aimed at military commanders wanting to get that command and control over the battlefield: http://engt.co/rag6MG

We don't know if this product is any good but it might tap into the potential of multi-touch to deliver intuitive interfaces that don't require extensive training or place great demand on the operator to remember how to use it in stressful situations.

So many uses for glass

Another look into the future...especially around multi-touch interfaces. Although our first reaction was "what a lot of finger prints"!



Although this is clear a promotion for the various uses of glass technology it did raise some interesting questions about do we want access to information and communications technology in so many parts of our lives?

Multi-touch interfaces - now and a vision from the past

We're involved in some interesting projects applying multitouch to the design of new control systems - hopefully we'll be able to post something on these soon.  But in the meantime we thought it was interesting to compare one of the current systems - Microsoft Surface...

...with this video we came across of a long forgotten idea from Sun in 1994 for future systems called Starfire.

 

It's a big desk but there's lots there that isn't a million miles away - touch interaction, video-conferencing, instant messaging, collaborative working environments on documents, scanning & embedded information into other media, 3D modelling and texture mapping, etc.  Maybe we still have some way to go on voice control & telepresence.

Future screen technology??

We came across this which presents some interesting ideas about the future of screen techology and how that will impact on interfaces and how information is accessed and distributed.  We might be able to do without the news whilst brushing our teeth first thing in the morning though!

Multi-touch interfaces in airport traffic planning

We've been spending some time recently looking at the potential for the use of multi-touch interfaces in control room design.  It seems to be a strongly emerging technology in the consumer market but so far hasn't made so much impact in the world of command and control.

In digging around we came across this video from American Airlines where they were looking to introduce a multi-touch system to replace a rather antiquated paper-based system in an airport traffic planning environment which plans the movements of planes on the ground.




For those of you attending the International Control Room Design Conference in Paris this October, look out for the paper from Adam Parkes on multi-touch interfaces - there may also be a sneak preview of the paper later in the summer on the CCD website.