Installations like this one at the University of Oregon show the potential of massive touch surfaces produced using Visual Planet's touchfoil technology.

Open up a cardboard tube, roll out a transparent film just millimeters thick, apply it on a flat object and *tada* you’ve got an interactive touch surface. Cambridge-based Visual Planet just launched its new massive-sized multitouch thin film drivers so you can create touchscreens from 30 to 167 inches in size! Their touchfoil is a transparent nanowire embedded polymer capable of sensing the touch of a finger, or even pressure from wind and translating that to a computer interface. It works on glass, wood, and other non-conductive surfaces. Along with their many partners, Visual Planet can ship a custom built film (almost) anywhere on the planet and help you create a unique interactive display that will turn heads and hold attention. Check out some of their many applications using LCD screens, rear projection, and more in the videos below. Is this proven technology just a novelty, or will it help transform our environment into a digital wonderland?

I have to start with some of the impressive demonstrations Visual Planet and its partners have created. Over the past seven years they’ve installed “thousands” of these surfaces around the globe. The first is a simple LCD monitor that has been covered in the touchfoil (aka the “ViP Interactive Foil”). Multitouch like this can be produced at sizes up to 60 inches. Single touch goes all the way up to 167 inches, as you’ll see in the second video. The general appeal, and versatility can be seen in the third video, taken at an installation in Oslo.

With their launch of the multitouch drivers, Visual Planet is helping expand its user base by including Windows 7 compatibility and courting developers with an SDK. Their fairly new website also highlights how they can work with their partners to provide you with a custom solution from distribution of the film to installation to software development. Their YouTube channel is also chock full of videos showcasing tons of different use-cases and sizes. Basically if you have a display (LCD, projection, etc) and you have a surface (store front window, support column, floor, etc) Visual Planet can turn it into a touchscreen.

That’s impressive, but it’s also old news. Visual Planet has been installing these films for years. If you’ve read Singularity Hub regularly (which causes much less brain cancer than you would think) you may remember our earlier coverage of Displax. The Portuguese company did many of the same demonstrations. That makes sense as they were one of Visual Planet’s partners. There are true competitors, however. 3M has had a similar technology for years, and as you get into smaller sizes the number of available solutions skyrockets.

Which makes me very curious as to why we don’t have more of Visual Planet-style interactive surfaces out in the world. Thousands? Sure, that’s pretty good for an emerging technology, but honestly most of us probably won’t see these devices regularly until there are millions. What’s the hold up?

I’m not sure large touchscreens are the right tool for the job. They are uniquely impressive, I’ll give you that, but having seen a few in malls (as maps) or in kiosk ads (with games to attract viewers), I think there are too many drawbacks. They get grimy (who wants to touch something everyone else has touched?), they can get worn, they are locked into place, and your use of the technology is very public. People are going to watch what you’re doing. Compare that to augmented reality on your smart phone. You get similar levels of touch interaction with the real world, just on a smaller, more personal scale. Less impressive? Maybe, but it lets people find the information, and interact with it, on their own terms. To me, AR is going to be the more desirable solution for the majority of use cases.

So…yeah. That leaves me with this amazing looking technology whose applicability is somewhat questionable. Huge screens you can touch? Sounds amazing, but for now I think it will remain a novelty. Applications that draw attention – like an interactive touchscreen bar in a pub – will probably work well. Applications that want to be really useful – I think we’ll just go with our phones instead. But maybe I’m wrong? Tell me what you think in the comments. Visual Planet has definitely made its technology as accessible as it can, now it’s up to all of us technophiles to decide whether or not we really want it.

[image and video credits: Visual Planet]
[sources: Visual Planet]

Touchscreens and swarm robotics go together like geeks and video games.

Mark Micire’s PhD dissertation puts robotic control at his fingertips. The UMass Lowell student developed a command and control program for the Microsoft Surface touchscreen so that swarm robots can be easily guided. Watching Micire’s program in action makes it look like he’s playing StarCraft, only with real robots. Teams of bots can be color coded, groups can be selected by circling them with a finger, and robots can be commanded to move either individually or en masse. You can even manually drive a robot with a special pop-up interface. What’s the use for this multitouch control system? There are military applications, but Micire has a strong background in search and rescue robotics. Touchscreen swarms could be the next innovation in disaster relief. Watch Micire’s demo his system in the video below.

Swarm robots come in a huge variety of shapes, sizes, and capabilities, but they generally follow one strategy: many hands make light work. Bots are used together to divide and conquer a problem, overcoming challenges with a large number of workers. Many of the swarms we’ve seen are autonomous. In critical missions, however, robot AI may not yet be sufficient to find a solution to a problem. That’s why human guidance is still very important. Micire’s touchscreen program gives the operator various levels of control. This would allow humans to adjust their involvement as the case warrants. If robot autonomy can handle a situation, commands could simply instruct bots in a general way – go there, look for human bodies, report back. The system also allows for more direct commands – follow this route, etc. When direct human control is needed, operators can manually drive bots using the DREAM interface (Dynamically Resizing Ergonomic And Multitouch), as you can see at 2:23 in the video below.

Unfortunately, the demo above doesn’t show the system controlling physical robots. The bots on the screen are simulated. But Micire can control real world robots using the touchscreen, as you can see in the video below:

Micire’s work seem immediately applicable to fieldwork for robotics. It’s really no surprise considering his experience in search and rescue operations. It’s important to remember that robots already form a valuable part of S&R teams, allowing humans to explore areas that are too hazardous or difficult to reach. Case in point, here’s Micire’s video of work he did in Mississippi after Hurrican Katrina back in 2005

Of course, there are many applications for guided swarms besides disaster relief. Autonomous and guided drones are valuable assets in modern warfare, and advanced control systems like Micire’s could improve their usability. We’ve already seen how a similar technology (telestrators) are being developed by the US Air Force. Additionally, touchscreen controls could help swarms tackle industrial maintenance, exploration, or even surgery.

Swarm robotics holds a lot of potential, but most of the focus we’ve seen has been on the robots themselves. Micire’s work shows an interesting way in which humans can be readily inserted into the robot’s decision making process. In the near term that will allow these swarms to perform better as human intelligence still exceeds AI. Once autonomy out-paces human decision making we may still use such command systems as a means of providing over-arching control of our robots. It will be interesting to see if the potential of Micire’s program attracts any real-world applications in the years ahead.

…Maybe someone needs help fending off a zergling rush?

Video of Mark Micire’s complete PhD defense can be found here.
[screen capture and video credits: Mark Micire]
[source: UMass Lowell, Mark Micire]

The WallScope has 22 megapixels driven by 31 node cluster drives. You need that to explore a 13.3 gigapixel photo or play really cool games of Quake.

Students at the University of Tromso in Norway have built an amazing multitouch wall with a mind-blowing 7168×3072 resolution – 22 megapixels! The WallScope has 28 projectors whose graphics are fueled by 31 nodes in a cluster. A series of 16 cameras on the floor create a 2D ‘multitouch plane’ so you can control the WallScope without making contact with the wall. Recently, the students used the WallScope to explore a huge 13.3 gigapixel photo of Tromso, zooming in with resolution you can’t appreciate on any other system. Tor-Magne Stein Hagen and Daniel Stodle created the setup under the guidance of their professor Otto Anshus. While the gigapixel photo is breaking news, the multitouch wall technology behind the WallScope has been around for a few years, long enough for the Tromso team to play some pretty awesome games of Quake. We got video of the gigapixel photo on the Wallscope, as well as an older demo of the system’s capabilities. Don’t miss the sweet Quake action at 1:46 in the second video – they even wrote a paper about it!

We’ve seen some impressive multitouch walls, but the power of the WallScope is pretty sweet. It may not have the audio of the Las Vegas Hard Rock Cafe touch wall, but the graphics are definitely superior. Remember that 45 meter long multitouch wall in Germany? That was 34 megapixels. Wallscope is only about a tenth as long but has more than half the pixels. That’s crazy resolution. Of course, some of that graphic beauty is marred by the irregularities in projectors. The WallScope website explains that many of those projectors are old and failing, leading to large variations in brightness. That’s unfortunate, but I still think the Wallscope’s resolution on that scale looks incredible.

Now, when you have that much density of image, there’s only so many practical applications. I love playing video games, but the real news here is the gigapixel (Gpx) photo. As we’ve seen before, Gpx photos are time consuming, difficult creations, but they give an amazing sense of cityscapes. I could see systems like WallScopes built to allow people an in-house (in-museum?) look at distant locations. Sight-seeing without the travel. Systems like this may also find applications in education as we’ve seen with touchscreen autopsies. No matter where we end up seeing these high resolution touch surfaces, however, I’m sure people will be clamoring to use them. I certainly am. …How much is a plane ticket to Norway this time of year?

Three person multitouch Quake on a 22 megapixel wall...all right, when can I get one?

[image and video credit: Tor-Magne Stien Hagen, Daniel Stødle and Otto J. Anshus, University of Tromsø, Norway, In collaboration with Eirik Helland Urke, gigapix.no]
[sources: University of Tromso, Gigapix.no]

The 10/GUI concept calls for a screen-sized touch pad on the desktop. Seems like a step sideways, but it could be the next generation of human computer interface.

Teams of developers are racing to construct the next great human-computer interface, and most already have a product to peddle. Clayton Miller is still working on an idea. His 10/GUI is a group focused on conceptualizing the system that will replace the mouse and keyboard as the most common user interface. Their proposed interface is unlike a tablet computer, or a gesture controlled system. 10/GUI wants a display size touchpad on the tabletop so that all ten fingers can interface with the computer without overlapping the screen. Coupled with this new hardware comes a new software paradigm. 10/GUI avoids a two dimensional (or even three dimensional) windows-based digital space in favor of a single dimension of frames. Sort of like your entire screen becoming a task bar. 10 finger touchpad and linear arrangement of applications makes for a really cool approach to the standard problems of desktop computing. Take a look at the following video and judge for yourself whether this is genius or just madness.

The multi-touch display-size pad and the new digital environment (called Con10uum) are actually fairly close to what we have now. These are small changes from the mouse and the windows desktop. Which is why I find the 10/GUI idea rather captivating. As interesting as many advanced human-computer interfaces may be, there’s yet to be one that stands out as the obvious successor to the current model. 10/GUI and Con10uum are innovative enough to be an improvement but still simple enough to see rapid implementation without significantly retraining users or re-imagining applications (i.e. wordprocessors, web browsers, etc). That is, of course, assuming someone wants to take the time and provide the finances to bring 10/GUI to market.

I think that part of what makes our current mouse and keyboard setup so successful is that they allow a user to be fairly lazy. Interfaces that get your hands off the table such as a touchscreen, air mouse, or gesture controls, will fatigue your arms. 10/GUI gives you a tablet computer’s one to one touch to display ratio while still letting you be lazy. That’s a powerful idea. Not particularly thrilling in the long term, but for the next five to ten years, I could see it being very successful if it ever finds implementation. As with all human computer interfaces, 10/GUI will rise or fall on the interest of consumers. Like it or hate it, but be vocal about it. Companies everywhere are desperately trying to figure out how to create the control system of the future; they’re likely to listen to any idea if it gets enough support.

[screen capture and video credits: 10/GUI]

Here's The Invitation - Where is Mine!

Apple sent out invitations today to select media outlets, inviting them to “come and see our latest creation”.  The event will take place at 10am Pacific Time on Wednesday, January 27 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.  Will this latest creation be the rumored tablet device, or will Apple surprise us all with something completely different?  In just nine short days we will finally have our answer.

AppleInsider recently reported that select app developers have been told to prepare their apps for a larger, higher resolution device.  From the post: “developers were asked to prepare their apps for a demo next month by making them support a full-screen resolution, rather than the fixed 320×480 pixel size of the iPhone and iPod touch screen. The source said applications that can accommodate the larger screen size will run “just fine” on the new device.”

French Apple site Mac4Ever also claimed recently that “a new iPhone 4.0 beta SDK includes a “simulator” that aims to make it easy for developers to adapt to different screen resolutions. Some developers are allegedly already working with the beta SDK.”

Call us Apple fanboys if you want, but here at the Hub we are pretty confident that the new device from Apple is going to be awesome.  I took plenty of heat recently from readers for my “outrageous” ideas about how an Apple tablet would differentiate itself from iphones, netbooks, and desktops to create an all new device category.  My guess is that in 9 short days I will be vindicated.  The time is ripe for a new widespread computing paradigm that moves beyond the standard keyboard and mouse, and a new device from Apple just might pull it off.

The LightTouch uses IR to track motion and turn its 10.1 inch projection into a touchscreen.

How many hours a day do you spend staring at a flat surface? You probably don’t think of it that way, but TVs, computer screens, mobile phone displays – these are just boring flat surfaces until we place images on them. So why not forget those devices and keep the images? Light Blue Optics (LBO) is using holographic laser projectors to transform ordinary surfaces into interactive displays. Their Light Touch device projects a 10.1 inch screen and uses an IR light and camera to track finger position in that area. LBO recently announced at CES that it is working with Microsoft, Adobe, Toshiba and other partners to support Light Touch with their products. CES also named the device an as innovation honoree for the year. Check out a brief demo of Light Touch at CES in the video from BBCBlueRoom after the break.

We’ve seen various technologies looking to exploit the advantages of turning surfaces into interactive media. Projects like the mammoth RingWall are stationary and excel as multi-user interfaces. Pranav Mistry’s SixthSense device is highly portable and uses gestures to control data that is projected onto walls, newspapers or even hands. Light Touch is somewhere between these two extremes. It is small enough to be incorporated into spaces not traditionally dedicated to video interfaces, yet it is robust enough to handle multiple users and high quality video. The software and hardware it will interact with isn’t well defined yet. It can play videos and games off a stored memory, but it can also connect with computers, mobile phones, and other devices. The Light Touch could function as an attachable pico projector, I guess.

The Light Touch has some obvious limitations when it comes to luminosity. CES is in a well lit auditorium, and the display isn’t always bright enough to be clear to the video recording camera. That’s a common problem with small scale projectors that we’ve seen in the past. Of course, Light Touch does have the advantage of using laser technology, helping it maintain focus at any distance and on a curved surface. LBO is very proud of its version of holographic laser projection (HLP) which uses diffraction to produce images. The following video explains:

Go into many malls, airports, or museums these days and you’ll find interactive touchscreens incorporated into information kiosks. They’ve become something of a ubiquitous tool for guiding people how to use public spaces. I can see the Light Touch taking over that market almost entirely. While touchscreens do offer brighter displays, they also take up more space can be easily damaged by the repeated banging of anxious hands and fingers. The surface on Light Touch can never wear out and the delicate parts of the device can be secluded out of line of sight.

LBO's Light Speed system would project warning images onto mirrors or the windshield.

LBO and its HLP technology may also have an important role to play in automotive innovation. Their Light Speed projector system places important dials and warnings directly on the windshield or side view mirror to help drivers avoid accidents. It was integrated as part of the MINI concept car at the Paris Motor Show in 2008.

Despite these powerful niche markets that LBO could fill, however, I’m not sure if I prefer their device over related solutions. The SixthSense system does more and it will be open source, allowing for a wide number of applications to be created for it quickly. Tablet computers will provide mobility and versatility even if they are tied down to a single surface. In short, I think that the Light Touch is an amazing device, but I don’t think we’ll all have one. They’ll be incorporated into public spaces, maybe our cars, and that’s definitely cool. Projected touch screens are an important step in “waking up” our environment by incorporated digital information into it. Someday, of course, flat surfaces won’t just have computer images projected onto them, they’ll actually be made of computers. And I’ll probably still spend most of my day staring at them.

[photo credit: Light Blue Optics]
[video credit: Light Blue Optics, BBCBlueRoom]

The Apple Tablet Will Be Awesome

The hype and attention surrounding the impending launch of the Apple tablet is a fascinating marvel in the tech industry.  The product has not even been launched yet – Apple (AAPL) has not officially confirmed that the product is even in development – but nevertheless the entire tech community from media to consumers is absolutely enthralled by the Apple tablet, or islate, or whatever you want to call it.  And yet despite all of the hype, only a small few, such as Paul Buchheit, have given a decent explanation as to why we would want this mystical tablet when we already have smartphones, netbooks, and desktop computers.  In this post I will propose some ideas about how and why the tablet concept is going to differentiate itself from its computing brethren and revolutionize the world.

Too big to fit in your pocket, too wimpy to compete with a desktop computer, too limited without the ability to make phone calls or use as a handheld camera.  Thats what people are saying about the tablet.  Boy are they missing the point!

Without further ado, here are ideas about capabilities and features that a tablet will uniquely offer as compared to all other computing devices today.

Gaming:

The iphone has already revolutionized gaming with its touch screen interface, creating an entirely new gaming market and platform for people of all ages.  But with a 3.5 inch screen and limited computing resources, there is only so far you can go with iphone gaming.  The Apple tablet will play iphone games just fine, yet with its larger screen, more capable operating system, and the beefier hardware that can accompany its larger form factor, the games will be taken to an entirely new level.  The Apple tablet will be the first ever widely adopted touchscreen interface of this size.  Connect that with the itunes store for easy access to thousands of games, and you have yourself a winning recipe.  If I were a gaming company, I would be salivating all over this tablet with a vengeance.

The Ultimate E-reader:

A high quality tablet from Apple will absolutely blow the socks off of Kindle, Nook, Kurzweil’s new Blio, or any other e-reader available today.  After watching other people rave about their Kindles for the last year I finally bought one a few months ago to see what all the fuss was about.  I used my Kindle for about 2 days and then quickly relegated it to the dust bin.  No color, clunky buttons, and such a pain in the ass to bookmark, clip, share, and markup that I didn’t even bother to use such tools even if they existed.  The Apple tablet will be different.

Books, articles, magazines, and other classical print media will look stunning on the Apple tablet with beautiful colors and details.  Images and videos, sorely lacking from current e-readers like the Kindle, will come to life on the tablet.  Even more impressive will be the Apple tablet’s ability to add functionality that is simply not possible with classical printed media.  Bookmarking your favorite passages in a book will be as easy as highlighting the text with your fingers or some sort of stylus and then storing them for later reference in an easy to use, searchable, graphical menu system.  Borrowing from what we have learned on the internet with web documents, the Apple e-reader will allow you to clip, link, share, and in many other ways manipulate what you are reading.  Integration with social networks will allow you to easily forward or share passages, images, and clips from e-reader documents with friends and colleagues.  At some point, your friends or anyone else will be able to markup books and other documents on your tablet with comments, opinions, and other supplemental information of their own.  Your e-book copy of Pride and Prejudice will not be a static document, but rather it will be something that is alive, connected to the rest of the internet through social networks and web 2.0 paradigms.  When a character in a book visits real world places such as a building or location you will be able to click/press on the words and pull up a wikipedia reference or any other reference about the place.  Many of these capabilities exist naturally on web documents, but never has an e-reader offered such capability.  With the Apple tablet, traditional print media will finally receive the steroids boost that modern web based documents have enjoyed for more than a decade.

A la cart media:

With the launch of the Apple tablet, a la cart programming will be catapulted to a comprehensive level of offerings that will cause traditional cable broadcasters to shake in their boots.  In the United States and in much of the world people pay their cable company for hundreds of channels even though most of them are crap.  What we all really want is to order the programs that we want, when we want them, and we don’t want to overpay for stupid all inclusive packages.  If I only want to watch Seinfeld reruns and football why do I have to buy the hundreds of other channels offering stuff that I don’t want?  The iphone has already brought us substantial a la cart programming through itunes.  Music, movies, lectures, and audio books are just a taste of the offerings currently available through the itunes store.  With the launch of the Apple tablet, the already emerging trend of individualized a la cart offerings will be further entrenched.

Once millions of Apple tablets are out in the wild the critical mass will be achieved for individuals and independents to sell their own digital creations – movies, short videos, essays, tutorials, books – for a price that they choose – directly to tablet owners.  An entire new market of individuals selling content directly to other individuals with itunes as the intermediary and the Apple tablet as the viewing device may emerge.  Apple doesn’t offer this sort of market at the moment because the iphone/itouch devices have not had the e-reader capability, screen size, and other features to make such a market feasible.  With the launch of the tablet such a market may be born.

If it scares you just a little bit that Apple’s grip on our lives as the middleman to so much media infrastructure will be so complete then you are not alone.  The Apple tablet will only intensify the already scary walled garden that Apple has been building with its iphone/itouch/itunes platform during the last decade.

Our only hope of saving consumers from this disastrous enclosure will be Google, the white knight of technology that has several times now broken the grip of companies by creating open standards and open products such as android, chrome OS, chrome browser, free DNS, Google reader, Gmail, and so on.  As a former employee of Google I am of course biased, but seriously if Google doesn’t save us from Apple’s walled garden, who will?

3D interface:

A patent uncovered by Gus Sentementes at the Baltimore Sun indicates that the Apple tablet may offer a revolutionary jump in user interfaces with a move to 3 dimensions.  Objects will be released from their 2D cages, allowing us to spin them, flip them, rotate them, and so on.  This will have obvious implications for the gaming revolution cited above, but will also offer new use cases for interacting with data and media.  3D interfaces such as those from Bumptop been relegated to research labs and small use cases thus far because a massively adopted consumer device has never offered the large touch screen interface that makes them practical.  3D interfaces simply don’t work very well with a keyboard and mouse!  The world has been waiting for a device such as the Apple tablet to take 3D user interfaces out of the lab and into the mainstream, and this is exactly what could happen.

Accelerometer, GPS, and touch interface like iphone, but better:

The accelerometer, GPS, and touch interface offered by the iphone has revolutionized our options for interacting with games and information.  The Apple Tablet will take this paradigm to the next level.  Working with spreadsheets, writing essays, sorting images, and countless other tasks simply are not practical on the limited sized screen and wimpy processing power of the iphone.  The Apple tablet will offer the screen size and the computing resources to perform all of these tasks and more, but now these tasks will be augmented with the capabilities offered by GPS, accelerometers, and the touch interface.  Sorting your thousands of photos could be done by “pouring” them into different virtual buckets.  Items within excel style spreadsheets could be sorted not by clicking and dragging them with a mouse and shift/ctrl keys, but rather with natural grasping and dragging motions from your fingertips.  The possibilities are enormous.  Entire new use cases and methods for interacting with data will be born.

Stylus:

Manipulating information on the Apple tablet with our fingertips will be extremely useful, but certain operations will require more precision than our fat stubby fingers can offer.  For more precise manipulation of the screen, a stylus will be created with a tiny tip capable of manipulating parts of the screen perhaps as small as a single pixel.

Awesome Video Chat:

Video chat on the Apple tablet will be an obvious killer feature.  Video chat isn’t something unique to the tablet of course – smartphones, netbooks, and desktops already offer such capability.  What will differentiate the video chat offered on the tablet is mobility and size.  You can’t easily pickup your clumsy netbook or your stationary desktop PC in the middle of a video chat, but the tablet will make this a breeze.  The tablet will allow you to move to conference room G in a building if your coworker kicks you out of conference room B without you having to stop your video session.  At home you will be able to show your video counterpart something in another part of the house, or go grab a snack in the kitchen, carrying your handy tablet in tow without interrupting the video session.  Beyond mobility, integration with the other applications and software on the tablet will make tablet based video chat an awesome experience.

Amazing expandability with third party devices using standardized ports, such as USB:

If Apple is smart they will use open interfaces such as USB to enable a vibrant ecosystem of third party manufacturers around the globe to create an infinite array of attachments, addons, and upgrades to your Apple tablet.  Consumer electron microscopes, printers, high end speaker systems, data storage devices, and all of the other devices that we now connect to our desktops and netbooks should be able to plug into your tablet.  But now they will be able to leverage the unique offerings of the tablet, such as GPS, accelerometer, and touch screen – something that traditional desktops and netbooks cannot offer.

Excellent sound quality:

With its larger form factor the Apple tablet will be able to incorporate excellent sound quality right into the device.  This type of sound quality simply isn’t possible with a tiny iphone today.  For even better sound quality, off the shelf speakers will plug right into your tablet, bringing the highest sound quality available right to your tablet for presentations, watching movies, whatever.

Multiple users at the same time:

The iphone, netbook, and desktop computer are not designed for two or more people to work on them simultaneously.  I watch youtube videos on my iphone all the time with friends and family, but the tiny screen size makes it inconvenient for even 2 or 3 people to hover around the video at the same time.  The large screen of the tablet will fix this.

Collaborative activities where two people are manipulating the screen at the same time will also be an interesting use case.  Games could be played with opposing players each protecting their side of the tablet.  In certain use cases it may be useful for two people to physically manipulate data, documents, or media at the same time.

Beautiful, Custom Built Operating System And Hardware:

The operating system and hardware powering the tablet will serve as the foundation for all of the features described thus far.  Without a beautiful, graceful, intuitive user interface the tablet will fail.  Nobody doubts Apple’s ability to produce beautiful hardware and software, and in this area the tablet will not disappoint.  The OS and user interface for the tablet will be simple to use, gorgeous, and built from the ground up to perform its purpose.  The Dells of the world will be forced to adapt the ill-suited Microsoft windows for the creation of their tablet wanna-be contenders – an automatic recipe for failure.

Conclusion:

The mythical Apple tablet lies at the nexus of converging trends in mobile devices, touchscreen interfaces, and personalized content anywhere, anytime, and on demand.  Therein lies the confusion about the tablet’s place in our world but also the beauty of what it will offer.

Amazingly, even though Apple has not officially announced that it is creating a tablet device, the industry has already embraced the idea of the tablet anyway.  Just this week Freescale Semiconductor announced plans to launch a tablet PC later this year.  Google is rumored to be working on its own competitor.  Dell already has a tablet-like device called the XT2 Tablet that is commercially available right now.  Dozens of other companies are expected to make tablet announcements this week at the CES 2010 in Las Vegas.  2010 is already the year of the tablet based purely on rumor and speculation alone.  It really is an unbelievable phenomenon that we are witnessing unfold.

Too bad for the competition that Apple is going to whip their butts all over the map.  Apple has reportedly been working on the tablet for at least a year, possibly two.  Whatever dinky products other companies dream up at CES or elsewhere, it will be too little too late.

The Apple tablet is going to be a revolutionary device and I can’t wait for it to come into this world.  Nevertheless, I am fearful of the powerful grip over our lives that it will deliver to Apple.  Google, if you are listening, please save us from a one player market and give us a device and a platform that is every bit as good as Apple’s but free of its walled garden.  You are our only hope against Apple hegemony!

Yeah, those little things next to the bottom, those are people.

Back in September I was agog over the touchscreen wall at the Hard Rock Cafe in Las Vegas. Little did I know that the Ring Wall had already been in operation for three months by that time. It’s almost unfair to compare the two, by the way, the Ring Wall is easily twelve times the size of the Las Vegas screen. Still, sound may be better at the Hard Rock Cafe as the Ring Wall only has 30 directional speakers to stretch over it’s entire length.

As for the purpose of the Ring Wall…intimidation of Sensory Mind’s competitors perhaps? I could see such displays serving well in large international museums, or as a means of sharing information in airports and train stations. Sensory Minds seems to have filled Ring Wall mainly with motor sports information, but it’s hard to tell. Eventually, technology like this, or the building-wide projectors we’ve discussed earlier, will transform all public spaces into enormous outlets for digital data. In twenty years when you’re browsing the internet by tapping on the sidewalk remember that it all started with the appearance of the Ring Wall.

[photo and video credit: Sensory Minds]

Squeezing the rubber nose makes the face go cross-eyed.

The average touchscreen leaves you petting or clawing at a flat surface, but the new PhotoelasticTouch system gives you something to squeeze. Produced by researchers at the University of Electro-communications and the Japan Science & Technology Agency, the photo-elastic system uses transparent rubber shapes that sit on a LCD screen to act as input devices. Touch a 3D face and the screen changes the eyes so look at what you’re doing. Pick up a rubber shape and twist it to pour virtual paint onto the surface. The developers presented their innovation at SIGGRAPH earlier this year and let attendees play with the new interface. It’s a pretty awesome concept and you can check it out in the videos from TheKeyIdea blog after the break.

I’m not sure if squeezably soft 3D rubber screen-toppers count as haptics devices, but there’s certainly something rewarding about having any sort of tactile interaction with a computer. As we enter into the next generation of human-computer interfaces, we’re going to see a lot more emphasis on physicality. Humans, after all, are often tactile/kinetic learners.

As the video above explains, the light from the LCD is polarized. A camera above the screen also has a polarized filter. When the transparent rubber object between the two is deformed, it changes the polarization of the LCD light. The camera detects this change and voila, the system responds to the deformation. Not only can this PhotoelasticTouch concept be used to animate the 3D objects, it also serves as a mouse tool with variable pressure response. Check out the video below to see what I mean:

What happens when you cover the entire screen with transparent rubber? You get a tactile surface that easily responds to position and pressure. The rubber is an overlay rather than built-in presumably because the team worked with an off-the-shelf LCD touchscreen. I would think that eventually the system should just incorporate the rubber surface into the touchscreen. In any case, multiple layers of the transparent material can be stacked without noticeable loss of signal from the LCD screen as shown in this video:

I’ve noticed that these next generation interface prototypes always have a simple art software package associated with them. While I applaud the combination of art and technology, I wonder if the developers for these technologies have done any long term thinking about the software innovations that will have to accompany their hardware upgrades. What sort of programs will require a squeezable rubber interface? As cool as the PhotoelasticTouch system may be, is it that much better than a traditional touchscreen?

To some degree, I feel like a majority of the human-computer interface research I see is still in the “see what sticks to the wall” phase. Innovators seem to be trying out any crazy idea that may work. I love it. We’re going to get many junk ideas from that approach, but we’ll also get a more thorough exploration of the possible ideas. I’m not sure the transparent rubber interface is useful enough to become a dominant trend in touchscreen technology, but it definitely looks cool. For the next few years that’s likely to be something I say often as we continue to watch how human-computer interfaces develop. Eventually though, we may find a system that is so intuitive, precise, and easy to learn that keyboards and mice will vanish in its wake. Hopefully that system will be as fun to use as PhotoelasticTouch.

[photo credit: University of Electrocommunication, Jappan Science &Technology Agency]
[video credit: Billy Chen, TheKeyIdea]

Forearm sensors translate muscle movements into control commands for Microsoft Surface.

Researchers at the University of Washington, University of Toronto, and Microsoft Research have developed a system to control a computer through a device that reads muscle movement. Using eight sensors attached to the surface of the forearm you can now communicate basic commands by moving your fingers and hand in stylized gestures. The team of developers has adapted the new system to work with Microsoft Surface, the advanced table sized touchscreen. We’ve got a great demonstration video of the muscle control hardware interacting with MS Surface after the break.

It seems like every few days, a tech company finds a new way for us to control computers. These next generation human-computer interfaces all seem to have one goal in common: increasing the physical intuitiveness of computer control. In some cases, the physicality is expressly required by the device. The HAL cyborg from Cyberdyne relies on electromyography (EMG), just like the new muscle sensing control technology. However, tactile interfaces are becoming more popular purely as replacements for keyboards and mice, especially in casual environments like the Hard Rock Cafe in Las Vegas. For those of us who have adapted well to typing and point and click commands, the new physical interfaces may seem imprecise. To some extent they still are. Yet when paired with improved algorithms for speech, gesture, and facial recognition the new line of human-computer interfaces is getting ready to connect us directly to our digital world. Keyboards and mice, like so many middle men in our evolving economy, are being cut for efficiency.

Watching the demonstration video for the Microsoft Surface muscle-enhanced controls, I am struck both by the ease of use, and the lack of necessity. Do we really need a way to let each finger represent a different color? Is it that important to have pressure sensitive finger painting? Of course not, but clearly these are just first steps. On a standard computer, you have two areas: a control space and a display space. In touchscreen and other new mediums, the two areas have merged. Muscle controls are just one way in which we may be able to take advantage of that new overlap. Building on intuition, the simple pinches to pick up and flicks to undo could evolve into a gesture system which maximizes control of the device while being easy to use. It will be interesting to see how these gestures differ across the globe. Will everyone find flicking a common sense way to erase their actions?

Clearly the EMG controls have applications far outside of the Microsoft Surface platform. The research team presented some of those applications at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (ACMUIST). Their presentation claims that the technology’s recognition of gestures is fairly accurate in all sorts of conditions: 79% while making pinching motions, 85% while holding a mug, and 88% while carrying a weighted bag. Right now, the system requires eight sensors to be attached to skin of the forearm and hardwired to the computer. Future designs may require fewer sensors and take advantage of wireless signaling. We’ve got the ACMUIST presentation below.

I consider the EMG sensors, Microsoft Surface, and many other “next-generation” input devices to still be in their infancy. They’re expensive, not widely available, and in need of many iterations of refinement before they’d be competitive with current technology. Of course, they are also amazingly cool. Which is probably why some, maybe even most, of them will continue to be adapted and evolved in the upcoming years. I can’t wait to see what they grow into.

[screen capture and video credits: Microsoft, University of Washington, University of Toronto, ACMUIST]