[Sigia-l] When will you buy one?

[Karl Fast]

Touch surfaces are getting more attention by HCI researchers,
especially as they get more affordable.

There are four big advantages associated with them.

1. Multi-touch. This makes interaction more fluid, natural, and
seamless. Careful studies of how people modify their surrounding
space, like their office, has shown that two handed interaction is
pervasive, subtle yet essential, and mostly overlooked. I believe
this will be crucial to making better interactive systems.

2. Collaboration. They do a much better job of supporting group
interaction. The keyboard-video-mouse model is mostly awful at this.
Watch people huddled around a computer in an office and you'll see
lots of fingers pointing at the screen. Interactive surfaces capture
and extend this behaviour naturally and effortlessly.

3. Visualization. Most of prototypes emphasize interaction with
visual structures. The demos don't show people writing essays or
tallying spreadsheets. Instead, you see them interacting with
photographs and maps and various visual abstractions. The
interactions usually involve various kinds of probing (zooming and
panning) and repicturing (rotating, bending, twisting, resizing).
There are other interactions, but the demos tend to highlight these
because they are easily learned, show up well in a news clip, and
have a high gee-whiz-wow factor. But the interaction possibilities
run much, much deeper.

4. Integration with physical objects. This is nicely demonstrated in
the MS video, but there are other applications. A group at Stanford
has a prototype that integrates digital pens and paper with a
digital surface. You write on the paper, the surface captures a
digital copy, which you can then tear off and drag onto the surface.
A second user can then move it onto their paper and keep working
with it.


These surfaces, both horizontal and vertical, have been around for a
while, usually in labs or highly specialized areas like analyzing
weather data. They have recently become better, cheaper, and easier
to manufacture. I wasn't expecting to see more "affordable" versions
on the market for another year or two, but I'm quite happy to see
them being actively developed. 

Personally, from my readings and my own research on interaction for
supporting open-ended inquiry, I think these have enormous potential.





-- 
Karl Fast
http://www.livingskies.com/