Link: Tap is the New Click (vimeo.com)
Posts Tagged: gesture
7
Sep 08
The state of touch technologies
The latest of the Economist’s Technology Quarterly has a survey of the history and state of touch technology.
“The double click does not translate terribly well to touch screens, however. This has led some researchers to look for alternatives. In developing his multi-touch screen, Dr Han found that there can be more to touch input than simply detecting contact. He has found a way to determine how much pressure is being applied. Adding a thin polymer layer, scored with microscopic ridges, to his touch screens causes the bright spot created by a finger touching the screen to vary in size and brightness depending on the pressure. This makes it possible, for example, to drag an item on the screen and then, by pushing harder, to slide it under another item. ”
Link: Touching the future (economist.com)
25
Jan 08
Nokia patent on gestural UI
“By now, probably everyone who cares, knows that Nokia is working on a next generation, Apple Multi-Touch like user interface – Nokia S60 Touch. But beyond pretty video pictures and generic headings like ” new sensor framework”, “UI accelerator kit”, etc; Nokia is pretty tight lipped about how the new S60 Touch will actually work…I’ve got my hands on one interesting Nokia Touch User Interface patent, filed in June 2007, about six months after the iPhone announcement. And I’m impressed.”
Link: Unwired View / First glimpse inside Nokia S60 Touch. Going beyond Multi-Touch (unwiredreview.com, via)
15
Jan 08
Gestural interfaces
“The level of communication between users and their electronic devices has been largely limited to a pointing interface. To date, a few common extensions to the pointing interface exist. They include single- versus double-click or tap devices and devices that allow users to hold down a button while moving the pointing focus, such as mice, trackballs, and touchscreens. A user’s ability to naturally communicate with a computing device through a gesture interface and a speech-recognition interface, such as a multitouch display or an optical-input system, is still largely an emerging capability. Consider the new and revolutionary mobile phone that relies on a touchscreen-driven user interface instead of physical buttons and uses a predictive engine that helps users with typing on the flat panel. This description could apply to Apple’s iPhone, which the company launched in June, but it can also apply to the IBM Simon, which the company launched with Bell South in 1993, 14 years earlier than the iPhone. Differences exist between the two touch interfaces. For example, the newer units support multitouch gestures, such as “pinching” an image to size it and flicking the display to scroll the content.”
Link: Recognizing gestures: Interface design beyond point-and-click (edn.com)
31
Aug 07
Gestural interfaces
“The most basic and simplest gesture is pointing, and it is an effective method for most people to communicate with each other, even in the presence of language barriers. However, pointing quickly fails as a way to communicate when the object or concept that a person is trying to convey is not in sight to point at. Taking gesture recognition beyond simple pointing greatly increases the type of information that two people can communicate with each other. Gesture communication is so natural and powerful that parents are increasingly using it to enable their babies to engage in direct, two-way communication with their care givers, through baby sign language, long before the babies can clearly speak.”
Link: Recognizing gestures: Interface design beyond point-and-click (edn.com)
