Here, [Devlin] can be seen playing with a multitouch setup. We inspected it and found 4 lasers, located in the corners. We are pretty sure we have seen this exact setup before. There wasn’t really much of a booth there, so we played with the TV and then kept moving.
We also ran into a reader of Hack A Day and totally forgot to take his picture. Sorry man, if you run into us again, we’ll get you.
When will this insanity end so that we can work toward making BETTER UIs? Does NOBODY remember gorilla arms?! I’m still looking for somebody to at least make an effort at something like 10/UI http://10gui.com/
Hi Caleb,
Got any video of it in operation?
does 10gui actually have a working app? or is it just an animation?
Be sure to make it over to the Intel “Cube” in Central Hall, there were too many people for me to really look at it, but it’s screens and multi-touch was amazing to watch.
@Alan,
I don’t think we got a video of this one. We might have gotten some footage of perceptive pixel though.
@Cynyr,
I don’t think it really exists. I think it was just an idea and video.
mythgarr,
I watched through the video. I’m impressed with the fact that they did manage to work the use of all of the fingers into the interface device.
One thing I can’t really get out of the video is how it actually improves the user’s experience. I’m the kind of person who memorizes all of the hotkeys and uses them. For me, the experience with a computer is much more rapid than average. Keeping track of all of the windows mentally has never been a challenge. Would something like this improve my capacity to quickly operate a computer, or might it impair me because the pad for touch input takes up significant desk space (it has to – it must be big enough to be usable by people with large hands)?
I agree with the idea that the mouse and even hotkeys have outlived their usefulness. As the complexity of operations a computer can perform increases and the number of menu options and hotkeys increase with it, organization appears to be the biggest problem. I just don’t feel they’re tackling the real problems that GUIs have. They’ve really only created a new way to move windows around and interact with them, but they still resort to lists of menu options in order to get the computer to do what we want it to.
I think if this approach is going to succeed it’s going to have to take a radical redesign of GUI systems to better take advantage of all of the fingers working in tandem and it’s going to have to improve computing in some way (it can’t just be cool), either by making it faster to operate the computer so we spend less time doing it and more time producing, or by simplifying the experience so that people can become expert users more easily (granny doesn’t read instruction manuals or hit F1 – if she can’t figure it out by intuition the computer simply can’t do it).
If these catch on I’ll start my own line of arm braces, I’ll make a killing!
10/GUI doesn’t exist in anything more than an idea, but I’m shocked that while everybody and their dog is adding multitouch to displays, I haven’t seen a soul (aside from Wacom, but they’ve been in the game for decades) doing much R&D into horizontal surface touch interfaces.
All of the problems listed in the 10/GUI concept are correct – interacting with applications occludes the screen, screen smudging, gorilla arms, etc. I’m not fully sold that HIS concept is necessarily optimal, but it still seems more reasonable than slapping touch sensing capabilities onto every display you own.
Let’s see – which is more cost effective? Replacing your screen with one that supports multitouch? Or purchasing a separate touch sensitive surface?