New Generation Interface? | The Coffeehouse

ManipUni
Proving QQ for 5 years!

I found this video interesting. It needs some refinement from what they propose but in general I think they really might have something here. I would be very interested to try their computer and really think it might be "better" than the traditional mouse/keyboard design we use today (particularly if they modified their design so it wasn't flat like a keyboard but instead angled like a natural keyboard, wrists actually take a LOT of damage using a flat keyboard).

http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/10/13/10_gui/

Their window manager would slow me down a LOT. But as I said it has a lot of great elements and making it as fast as traditional window managers would only be a little tweaking here and there.

stevo_
Human after all

Just twittered about that, basically I don't think we would master multi finger interaction.. I think using keyboards and guestures is different because each is static, the keys are always in one place, and the guesture is always one general shape with my fingers + an action..

Interaction is much more different, we need to focus visual attention to that point, which is why the mouse works well, because we focus on one thing, and synchronize our hand movements to that.. I'm pretty sure that humans cannot focus on multiple things and coordinate fingers at the same time..

Which then makes me ask, whats the advantage? I've lost a mouse (which is really more accurate than a fat finger), and if I haven't lost the mouse then why they hell would I use the touch surface?

There are places where touch really makes sense, and I don't think Microsoft essentially added touch to win7 so much because they envisioned us all touching our screens and the mouse dying.

exoteric
I : Next<I>

A finger should be just as accurate as a mouse, it's the motion tracking that needs to be precise. Once you put down your hand on the pad you see where the cursor is, then you move it around precisely.

I'm quite tired of the old window management of Windows and Linux(es) and so welcome this. It's a step in the right direction. The window management is not quite what I'd like but along those lines - just give us one unbounded workspace with windows you can zoom into and out of easily.

Seeing the browser window arrangement was quite a deja vu experience. That's very much needed.

magicalclick

Watched the video. Pretty simular to what we already have. One finger to click. Two fingers to zoom. Three fingers..... hummm..... what does it do? I forgot. Anyway, three fingers does something, and four finger does something. The none-maximized windows are great. And no task bar really makes finding windows easier.

Anyway, not sure how the pad works. The current touch pad, we can recilibrate cursor like we do with a real mouse. Does this thing support cursor recilibration?

joechung

"What might be neat is if you could ... use a haptic table a la Surface as your input/output device." - me, 3 months ago

I liked Con10uum the first time I saw one... when it was called an accordion. Using the left and right edges of the screen, rather than just the top or bottom, was a nice touch.

The desktop concept would have been better if they had arranged the icons so that they were arranged like your fingertips when you slightly extend your fingers, rather than rigidly horizontal. Everything else is pretty much Apple multitouch gestures: nice use of swipe and pinch.

It's a nice start! It needs a little refinement.

DCMonkey
Monkey see, monkey do, monkey will destroy you!

You could probably come up with an equivalent set of standard interactions using a mouse in one hand and a auxiliary keypad for the other hand, like Engelbart's original mouse design.

spivonious

I like the placement of the touch interaction, and the support for 10 fingers and the associated gestures, but the linear windows would really take some getting used to. We've been in two dimensions for so long now that I think it would take a long time to get used to it. And I prefer being able to see what's open at a glance, not having to pinch zoom with four fingers to zoom all the way out.

Definitely some good ideas in there though.

exoteric
I : Next<I>

In reply to DCMonkey

#Oct 14th @ 1:19 AM

I like the large multitouch pad idea but still think that hand-obstruction of a multitouch display surface can be dealt with using projection. So your hands become layered display surfaces as they obstruct the lower surface, perhaps taking into account depth variations of the hands when projecting down on them. It's probably not physiologically beneficial to be staring down on a surface all day though.