Archive for the ‘Multi-touch’ Category

Touchscreen PCs Prompt Interface Innovations

Touchscreen displays are going to get a big boost from Windows 7’s built-in support for multitouch tech — but there’s a hitch: Flicking, scrolling and opening programs can be cumbersome when stubby fingers meet Windows’ tiny icons and menu items.

“PCs with touchscreens look cool, but what do you do with them?” says Jennifer Colegrove, a director at Display Search. “When it comes to the iPhone there are 50,000 applications that use touch — but what do you do on a PC with touch?”

To help answer that question, some companies are building touchscreen-centric “skins” for Windows aimed at making tactile navigation more pleasant. Two big PC companies, HP and Lenovo, as well as a startup called BumpTop, have built touch-oriented user interfaces that will run on top of Windows.

“The question is, can we rethink the touch interface as a first-class citizen and provide a fresh approach to the desktop?” says Anand Agarawala, founder and CEO of Toronto’s Bumptop. “Not only is touch a more natural way to interact with your desktop but it also adds to your productivity.”

Touchscreens are not as popular on PCs as they are on smartphones.  Only about 3 percent of the desktop and notebook PCs available today have a touchscreen, says research firm Display Search. But it is a growing market. Driven by their experiences with touchscreen-based smartphones such as the iPhone and Palm Pre, consumers are craving to reach out and touch their PCs — or so PC makers think.

On Thursday, Sony announced a new touch-enabled, multimedia PC called the Vaio L Touch HD PC. The device has a 24-inch touchscreen display. Last month, Lenovo introduced the a tablet PC and a ThinkPad laptop with a touchscreen display. HP is expected to offer updated versions of its TouchSmart computers in time for the holiday season.  Even Dell now offers a touchscreen option for its all-in-one desktop or nettop.

But the touch-sensitive hardware is only half the battle, because touchscreens can be difficult to use with an operating system designed for mice and keyboards.

HP was among the first to take on this challenge. The company introduced the TouchSmart PC, a desktop with a touchscreen, in 2007. Since then it has added its own user interface on top of Windows and created applications such as Recipe Box, a slickly designed program that presents each recipe in the form of a recipe card. The program also allows users to search for recipes online and save them in a similar format.

And, despite its identity as a hardware company, HP has built all the software for its touch interface. The company hopes more independent developers will jump in to create similar applications for the touchscreen.

Wanting to give its tablet-PC users a better experience is also why Lenovo designed a touch interface called SimpleTap. SimpleTap is a grid of colorful square tiles. It lets users choose functions, such as previewing the camera, enabling mute, adjusting the volume or screen brightness, or accessing a file, and assign them to squares within the grid.

The idea with SimpleTap is to let users get in, do a task and get out quickly, says Lenovo. “Touch is something we have looked at very hard for a long time,” says Lee Highsmith, a brand manager for Lenovo. “Windows 7 gives native support for touch, so there is less likely to be contention among apps and since it is built into the OS it is easier for everybody.”

BumpTop takes a similar but more-playful approach with its software that turns a touchscreen PC into a 3-D playground of sorts.

Apart from the standard flick, pinch and scroll, BumpTop has interesting new gestures such as “shove,” which uses the little finger to move files to the left, and “fan out,” a two-fingered gesture that spreads files out.

To add realism to its 3-D look, BumpTop is built on top of the Unreal Tournament videogame engine, which let the BumpTop developers give objects realistic physical properties. For instance, desktop objects like files or photos have a “mass” proportional to their size, so when a small object bumps up against a larger object, the large one doesn’t move as much.

“The physics is an important thing,” says Agarawala. “It is intangible but there is something about the experience that makes it more joyful to use.”

BumpTop, which launched a beta version of its product in April, has already seen more than half a million downloads of its software.

For its part, Microsoft is supporting these custom user-interface efforts. The upcoming Windows 7 operating system offers multitouch support for the first time. Windows Vista supported single-finger touch, which only enables an extremely rough-and-ready interpretation of complex gestures, says Agarawala.

“Windows 7 gives us information such as acceleration and velocity, so you can do much more complex touchscreen gestures,” he says. “So you can use five fingers if you want, something that Vista couldn’t support.”

New touchscreen interfaces open up the technology to more users, but they could also end up confusing users. There are no standard sets of gestures. Some gestures may be protected by patents — Apple has filed for patents on multitouch gestures, and BumpTop is doing the same — which could limit their adoption by other interface designers. That in turn could lead to confusion among consumers: Do I scroll with one finger, or two, or three? How do I rotate the screen?

People also have to know exactly what kind of touchscreen their systems have. For instance, BumpTop uses five-finger gestures that require higher-end touchscreens. So if your PC has a more primitive touchscreen and you install BumpTop, you may find that some gestures don’t work. There’s no error message: The gestures simply don’t work.

“It’s kind of the Wild West right now with touch,” says Agarawala. “But it is also an exciting opportunity to carve a new path.”

Check out videos of how Bumptop and Lenovo’s SimpleTap work, below.

Bumptop in Action

Lenovo’s SimpleTap Demo

Top Photo: Bumptop desktop interface/Bumptop

The Future of Mice (If There Is One) [Microsoft]

While touring Microsoft’s Hardware division, I saw some concept mice that renewed my faith in the quintessential desktop accessory, ones that had capacitive touch surfaces and cameras that enabled an array of precision multitouch gesture. Take a look:

The name of the game is multitouch. The Applied Sciences Group at Microsoft—who helped create with Natal—are basically researching hand-cradled versions of the laptop trackpads and camera gesture systems that are evolving in parallel elsewhere. Though large populations of computer mice may be dying out because buyers prefer laptops over desktops, the mouse still roars in gaming and artistic fields.

The irony is that Microsoft’s reveal of these concept mice comes on the heel of Apple rumors that a new, multitouch Mighty Mouse is on the way to market. Regardless, before Apple lets its mouse out of the bag, take a look at these, because there’s a lot going on here:

• Cap Mouse – So named because it’s capacitive touch, it’s possibly the most completed concept design, mapped with a series of sensible gestures, not just momentum scrolling and pinch zooming, but even thumb flicking to shift photos and toss windows around the screen. The designers made a conscious decision to leave the click mechanism in place, because, like on the MacBook Pro trackpad of their arch-competitor, that physical clicking reduces user confusion. In the video below, you can see the finger activity in the window on the left, while you see the results on the right:

• FTIR (Frustrated Total Internal Reflection) Mouse – Loser of the “coolest mouse name” competition here, this one uses an infrared camera that’s gauging the positions of fingers on a curved acrylic surface. The amount of finger positioning you could see on this baby was astounding, though it probably isn’t economical to use full-rez video of hand positions as a control.

• Orb Mouse – It’s similar to the FTIR but with a semi-sphere where the hand rests. The team mapped gaming commands to demonstrate how regions of the sphere could control different pieces of an app. Something about that sphere makes sense, like it would be easier to remember gestures at different clock positions or something.

• Arty (Articulated) Mouse – A smart low-bandwidth multitouch concept, it basically makes sense of assorted pinching gestures. There’s no camera, instead, the two finger pads each have a little mouse tracker in them, and the system measures how all three “mice” move relative to one another in order to fire off commands.

• Side Mouse – This strange half-mouse has a tracker and clicker, just like mice have had for eons. But it also has a camera that looks forward, interpreting what your fingers are doing and why. The beauty is that it’s basically a Natal for your hand—you can even set it a foot away, and gesture at it with both hands, if that’s what an app calls for. The catch is that when you are using it, you have to rest your fingers on the table, and it’s apparently a bitch to program around all of that involuntary hand movement.

I couldn’t help feel a bit sad when talking to these brilliant guys about their mice. After all, even though I used to be a huge mouse fanatic, it’s been years since I’ve used one. Perhaps it’s laziness or forgetfulness, or my couch-friendly work habits, but I do get the feeling the mouse’s days are numbered. Am I wrong?

Update: Video the research team made, complete with soothing ambient music, showing how each mouse works. Take a look:

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