Bringing iPhone touch technology to desktop
15th October 09
Posted in design, interactive, technology
We liked this.
Fairly cutting edge stuff - probably not easily accessible to everyday (’normal’ i.e. have-a-life) users, quite yet at least, but still really interesting step on the way from mouse to touch-based (more direct) interface. See what you think.
http://www.vimeo.com/6712657Thanks to @kunaldpatel for the heads up.
3 comments on “Bringing iPhone touch technology to desktop”
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Ben Malbon
Touch reminds me a bit of the 3D interface craze that rises and falls on a regular basis. It is one of those things that demos well but just never quite works. I think iPhone works well because of restricted, almost intimate nature of the movements. It is in perfect harmony of the intensely personal, private, nature of mobile devices.
Touch turns into reach as it scales to the desktop. Desktop devices are driven. You sit in your cockpit and are master of your universe. Touch quickly becomes a bottleneck to the fine grained manipulations that are routine on the desktop.
My 2 cents.
Cheers,
@dugla
The way they stuck the touchpad in front of the keyboard at the very end of the video looks very carpal-tunnel inducing. Ideally, the touchpad would somehow incorporate the keyboard functionality — why would you need 10 fingers to operate it otherwise? But yes, very interesting, and they are right about the upright screens.
There are some interesting pieces in this demonstration. I believe they are on the right path, with breaking the multi-touch interface away from the monitor itself.
I have been experimenting using an iPhone to control desktop applications (through OSC, using TUIO) and there is a key piece missing. A mouse is persistent, no matter where your hand is it remains on screen and your next interaction is relative to its previous location, its position is also seperate from its state of pressed. In this video they show the fingers remain on screen while not creating a touch action, thats something I haven’t seen before (and they don’t really talk about), an idle state of touch and actionable state of touch is a big piece of the puzzle. I still think losing the persistance of where your points were last time your hand was on the interface makes it a little tricky, and using your hands all day long on an interface like this may hurt.
Similarly, I’m not a big fan of the Con10UUM UI, forcing all windows to share similar dimensions is a design problem, different applications need to remain at different dimensions to best suit their use, its an interesting concept, but I would not want that operating system.