New Goggles Offer Minority Report-Style Interface With Heads-Up Display 67
Lucas123 writes "A Taiwanese non-profit R&D organization is demonstrating a new heads-up type display that allows users to interact with the floating virtual screens using finger swipes. The new i-Air Touch technology from the Industrial Technology Research Institute is being developed for an array of devices, including PCs, wearable computers and mobile devices. The technology allows a user's hand to be free of any physical device such as a touchpad or keyboard for touch input. ITRI plans to license the patented technology to manufacturers. The company sees the technology being used in not only consumer arenas (video), but also for medical applications such as endoscopic surgery and any industrial applications that benefit from hands-free input."
Yeah... Except (Score:5, Insightful)
Minority Report featured huge wall-sized displays that everyone could see what you were interacting with and appreciate the subtle finesse and precision with which you operated.
With these, people will cut throw startled glances and cut wide arcs around the goggle wearing special needs person doing a bizarre mime routine while walking down the sidewalk.
What would Tufte say? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a lot of push towards I/O systems that are more convenient for the manufacturers, but less so for the end consumer.
The first keyboards were heavy and had tactile feedback. If you fumbled a key typing in your password, you knew whether it entered because you could feel the "click". Nowadays the keyboard is lighter than a paperback and there's no feedback - accidentally brush a key with your finger and you have to look (for non-password text entry) or start over.
Twist knobs are highly intuitive, especially when coupled with feedback. Twist a knob and see the hands of the clock move, or see the numbers change. Control the speed natively, and if you go too far it's obvious how to back up. Nowadays we have buttons to tap, incrementing the count by 1 each time. Tap 50 times to set the minute display, and if you go too far you have to go all the way around again. This was done largely because buttons are easy to fabricate (using PCB contacts), not because they are inherently better.
Modern typing is done on the display (phone, surface), so not only don't you have tactile feedback you can't feel the boundaries of the keys, and your fingers mask the key display. And it's really tiny - in order to access all the keys you have to type extra keys that switch between keyboards (upper/lower/symbol). Again, it was done for ease of manufacturing, not ease of use.
Is the ribbon any easier than, for example, cascading menus? The problem with the Windows original menu system was that every application put their commands in the top-level Start->Programs folder, leading to start menus containing hundreds of links. (I take the time to move StartMenu command links into subfolders by type, which makes it much easier, but on my dad's computer it's impossible to find anything.)
Ever since minority report people have been touting the wonders of air-gesture input, and that it is the next "big thing", but is it better? (Actually, I remember it from Johnny Mnemonic, 7 years earlier.) Seems like this is just something that's easier to manufacture, but not easier to use. Sure, the customer will be able to do everything they could do with a mouse/keyboard, but more slowly, less conveniently, and with lots of frustration. That's an externality to the manufacturers, but it's better for them because they don't have to build in a touch interface. Probably [electrically] more reliable, too.
Is this really progress? I wonder what Edward Tufte would say about modern interfaces.