Posts Tagged: touch

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18
Jul 10

Commodity touch devices as UI infrastructure

Fabio Sergio writes about using standard consumer devices as infrastructure for all kinds of touch-enabled devices.

“Apple’s smaller-scale touchware has become so ubiquitous that it’s easier to consider it as a foundation, rather than as a building. I am guessing that the same will happen at a larger scale, and the iPad will soon appear as touchfrastructure wherever and whenever a portable, comfortably-sized touchscreen will be needed. I can see lots of reasons why such scenarios won’t be rare. Quite the opposite, actually.”

Link: Touchfrastructure meets the hypepad (frogdesign.com)

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20
Jan 09

Saffer talks about gestural interfaces

Link: Tap is the New Click (vimeo.com)

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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)

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20
Jul 08

Modal overlays

Aza Raskin write about avoiding modalities.

“What’s wrong with modal overlays? In a word, they are modal: You are either interacting with the content or the overlay. Modal overlays don’t allow you to refer back and forth between two sources of information, or move fluidly between two actions. The second problem with modal overlays are that they are disconnected and disjoint from other overlays—knowing how to access one doesn’t yield a physical sense of how to access another one; they do not scale to give a unified, cohesive interface. ”

Link: Mobile Firefox and Designing Without Modal Overlays (azarask.in)

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18
Jun 08

Touch Usability blog

Just came across a blog published by Kevin Arthur called Touch Usability. The blog tracks articles related to touch UIs, and has a great collection of content.

Link: Touch Usability (touchusability.com)

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28
May 08

Android video demos

A few Android video demos have landed. The first one shows some nice details with a window-blind metaphor for accessing core functions, as well as a perplexing use of the ‘icons on a desktop’ metaphor.

The second shows a rather cool use of a compass in the hardware. I’m sure that there are lots of fun opportunities for games as well as mapping. Sensors are making portable devices so much more fun.

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15
Oct 07

Rear-side touch surfaces

It’s all about touch these days.

“A touch-sensitive gadget with the sensing panel on its back, instead of the screen, is being developed by US researchers. Using your fingers behind the device allows a firmer grip and more accurate performance without obscuring your view of the screen, they say.”

“As soon as you put your hands on the display you [obstruct] the screen,” he says, something he calls the “occlusion problem”. Users of iPhones have other problems too, he adds. “Multi-touch devices detect the entirety of the touch area,” Wigdor continues. “That’s what we call the ‘fat finger’ problem.”

Link: ‘Transparent’ gadget could trump iPhone interface (newscientist.com)

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7
Jun 07

HTC Touch is broken

Marek Pawlowski reviews the HTC Touch, an attempt at a touch-screen that’s slightly out of the ordinary, and finds it slightly lacking.

“For starters, the TouchFlo sensor doesn’t work very well. The screen itself had an almost ’sticky’ feel to it when I first took the product out of the box and it was actually physically impossible to slide your thumb in the way required. This improved over time, presumably as grease built up on the screen, but there were more fundamental problems with the software. It just wasn’t very good at recognising the swipe gesture, so the success rate for flipping between screens was typically about 40 percent. More than half the time I was having to repeat the gesture to get it to switch screens.”

Link: Hands-on with the HTC Touch – a broken experience (mobileuserexperience.com)

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27
Mar 07

State of haptics

“The new phone goes much further, using very precise actuations of its built-in motors to produce realistic, button-like clicks whenever an onscreen button is pressed. “Using a touch-screen, you normally lose the tactile confirmation you get from pressing a button,” says Mr Viegas. But with haptic feedback, on-screen buttons can be made to feel real and are easier to use. “You get the feeling that you have somehow really touched this object on the screen,” says Tapani Ryhanen, head of strategic research at Nokia, the world’s biggest handset-maker, who has been investigating the idea of adding haptics to Nokia’s phones as well.”

Link: How touching (touching-people.com)

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8
Jan 06

Graphic language for touch

“This work explores the visual link between information and physical things, specifically around the emerging use of the mobile phone to interact with RFID or NFC…

“I�m interested in the visual link between information and physical things. How do we represent an object that has digital function, information or history beyond it�s physical form? What are the visual clues for this interaction?”

Link: Graphic language for touch (elasticspace.com)