“Jeff Han”:http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/ works on multi-touch interfaces: touch screens that can recognize more than one point of input, and thus combinations of gestures and so on. Here’s a “cool video”:http://www.macrumors.com/2007/02/12/more-multitouch-from-jeff-han/ showing some of the interface methods his company is developing. (Warning: cheesy music.)
You can see some cool possibilities for educational and presentational bells and whistles, such as the taxonomic tree one of the operators is shown navigating. The possibilities for high-dimensional dynamic data visualization are also obvious. We see a scatterplot being manipulated with some scaled data points on it, for instance. Something like “Ggobi”:http://www.ggobi.org/ would be fun to use on a system like this. In the near future, the phrase “touchy-feely” may well apply to the quantitative rather than the qualitative crowd.
{ 13 comments }
Scott Eric Kaufman 02.13.07 at 4:55 am
Incredible display there, but maybe you can set it up so it doesn’t run as soon as it loads? Personally, I don’t mind, but if I had a job…a life…a career, I could imagine the autorun futzing it up.
(Apologies if that sounds overly snarky. It’s just that my RSS reader’s now stealing all of my memory, and this post’s the reason. Would that Firefox didn’t leak memory like a ship full o’ axe murderers!)
Kieran Healy 02.13.07 at 5:13 am
Sorry about that. I fixed it so that it won’t start automatically now.
asg 02.13.07 at 5:22 am
Useful for some applications, perhaps, but 99% of computer work will still involve typing on a keyboard. You can’t write code, fill out a spreadsheet, enter task names into a project management app, or write a technical report using that interface. You could do some great supporting stuff, like diagrams or 3D models, but not the main content.
Kenny Easwaran 02.13.07 at 5:34 am
Didn’t we already see this in the iPhone demos? I guess that was just the existence of multitouch sensors, and not as much about the general interface. (I only say this because my boyfriend showed me a video like this one about a week or so before the iPhone demo, so it seemed familiar in the opposite direction.)
I think the real demonstration though was a computer with huge memory or processing or whatever power (50 videos playing at once, while watching for touches that could move or resize any of these videos?)
Kieran Healy 02.13.07 at 5:39 am
Useful for some applications, perhaps, but 99% of computer work will still involve typing on a keyboard. You can’t write code, fill out a spreadsheet, enter task names into a project management app, or write a technical report using that interface. You could do some great supporting stuff, like diagrams or 3D models, but not the main content.
Yes, yes, I’m not saying it’ll replace the keyboard. That’s why I said “bells and whistles” for presentations and some specific stuff like data visualization.
Didn’t we already see this in the iPhone demos?
Yes, there was some speculation that Han’s company was responsible for the interface there, but I think it wasn’t.
sanbikinoraion 02.13.07 at 10:37 am
Most people use their computers for office stuff or for surfing the web. We all know that the web is mostly comprised of pornography. So I suspect that this technology will succeed or fail on the question of whether the porn industry can do anything useful with it :P
Matt 02.13.07 at 3:06 pm
Not on topic at all but I’ve just seen that “old wood” Micah Schwartzman has apparently been hired to a tenure track possition at Virginia Law- a very nice position, I’d think, one deserving congratulations. Any chance he’ll come back and do some blogging now that he’s got a regular job?
Robin 02.13.07 at 3:42 pm
Didn’t we see a demo of this in Spielberg’s Minority Report?
Jay Conner 02.13.07 at 5:06 pm
When the liquid energy problem makes travel rare, we will meet friends, family and coworkers in setups deriving from this.
O brave new world, that has such technology in it !
chris y 02.13.07 at 6:44 pm
X-windows with touch screen? Elegant but hardly mind blowing. The real world problem is that for this sort of thing to perform at its best you really need that 44″ screen. On your 15″ lappie it’d look crowded and messy.
Kieran Healy 02.13.07 at 8:54 pm
I assumed the giganto screen would be a natural part of the setup.
notjonathon 02.14.07 at 3:17 am
Not to mention what it will do to alleviate carpal tunnel syndrome (there are days when I can’t even force myself to wrap my hand around a mouse).
jello 02.15.07 at 5:30 pm
fantastic apps for my profession – architecture – strangely, i had a dream of this (a daydream)just yesterday.
welcome the matrix…
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