Multi-touch Technology on Steroids


If you've ever wondered whether the 'multi-touch' technology present on Apple's iPhone and iPod products would make sense on a larger scale, then take a look at this video from perceptivepixel.com.

This technology has been being worked on since at least 2006 by Jeff Han, as a spinoff of an NYU project, and it has been featured on CNN's election coverage, and written up in several places, including this article on OSNews.com. Though I'm completely sold on the promise of this technology for vertical applications such as weather and news, I do wonder about the usefulness of this technology in the general purpose computing space.

Wondering about this technology's general usefulness doesn't mean it can't be an excellent niche market tech, but the prospect of most knowledge workers or others who enter a lot of data into their computer using this interface makes me cringe. Some people can get by with just 'haptic' feedback (ala the iPhone's typing mechanism), while others feel more comfortable with a dedicated keyboard (such as a laptop or Blackberry).

Still, a smaller-scale (say, small wall or painting-sized) version of Perceptive Pixel could make an excellent photo album/HVAC/AV controller for home use. If they can get the price down and also start making a variety of sizes to suit specific vertical niches, we may start thinking of multi-touch as a mainstream user interface paradigm, instead of the 'space age' awe it holds now.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Great Panel Discussion!

Thanks to Gwyn Firth Murray , Larry Augustin , and Jeff Luczcz for a very entertaining panel discussion around Open Source at the recent eBig meeting . I was a bit nervous about how this panel would come together since I was the 'rookie,' whereas Gwyn had worked with Larry and Jeff separately before. However, the commonality of the passion for Open Source brought this panel together nicely and there was an excellent exchange of ideas between and amongst the panel (as well as our audience). I think we had someone in the audience comment on the fact that it seemed like we had all known each other a long time! :) The areas we covered during the talk were: licensing, community development, and reasons for using Open Source. I think the panel all agreed on good reasons for using Open Source, with all of us giving cogent examples of what the value proposition for using Open Source is (taking advantage of the huge amount of R&D and work that goes into good Open Source project...
Read more

Community Management is a Career, Not a Job

'Community Management' is a hot topic, & a hot job field , but I think it's important to articulate that it's not a role which should be approached as a 'job'. What do I mean by that? Community Management should NOT be: A role you 'settle' for because you can't do other things Something you do as an ancillary part of your 'real job' Something you get into 'because it's hot right now' A position that you can perform in isolation, without constant upgrading of your skills/knowledge I've talked in the past about what kinds of skill sets I believe are necessary to be an effective community manager, and as I thought about my own career path, I realized that early on in my community management career, I considered myself an engineer doing community management, whereas I now think of myself as a community manager with an engineering background. It is a subtle, yet hugely important difference - one that allows me to draw on a...
Read more

The Power of the Open Source Periphery

Like a lot of people in the tech world, I try to read a variety of publications (both online and physical versions) to keep up with what is going on in the dizzying world of technology. Recently, I read a great article in a recent issue of Wired entitled Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up . This article explains in some detail, with examples, the problem of 'failure blindness' in scientific research. This phenomenon causes scientists and researchers to ignore anomalies in their results they didn't expect, which are therefore categorized as 'failures'. The article goes on to state that one of the best ways of overcoming this bias is to involve other people from outside of your immediate speciality in discussions about your results. For me, this triggered the thought process of why it's important to encourage participation in your communities (Open Source or internal) from folks on the periphery of your project - non-specialists who have somethin...
Read more