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Thursday, May 29, 2008

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Multi-Touch Scenarios on a Tablet PC

- Rob Bushway

James Kendrick says he has yet to have anyone give him a single usage scenario where multi-touch on a normal sized device, like a Tablet PC, makes sense.

I can give him plenty that don't involve the traditional picture zooming:

Math - interacting with clocks, manipulating objects for counting / sorting
Modeling scenarios - cars, clay modeling, CAD, 3-D animation
Practicing music where two or more notes need to be played at the same time to form a chord - guitar, piano, trumpet, etc. A person could practice the notes on a trumpet without having to put one to their lips. Heck, a 5" - 8" screen would be perfect for this. Think about holding an OQO in your right hand, with the three keys on the trumpet displaying, and being able to practice some music.
Writing music and then wanting to test it out quickly on the screen with your fingers.
Game playing with two people - play dough type of games for younger kids would be awesome. Take two fingers across the screen to form a string, then twist it with two fingers. Imagine the things kids could build. What about Legos - grabbing two or more pieces and putting them together, then manipulating them with your fingers. Picking up a bunch of Legos with your hand and moving them to another spot.
Geography - manipulating maps . Imagine putting your hands on a map, then pulling your hands a part like you are digging in to the picture to see more depth of what is underneath- multiple pressure points could allow that.
Science: grabbing several types of digitized chemicals with different fingers and joining them together to make something or form a different substance.
Painting - mixing colors from two or three different palettes
Imagine multi-touch that sensed torque, leverage, etc, from multiple points, and the kind of learning scenarios that would encourage around physics
What about engineering possibilities- roads, buildings, etc where moving things with multiple fingers, or activating pressure points on objects caused events to happen to test fault tolerances.
What about role playing for insurance - reenacting accidents with cars ( manipulating two cars with fingers on different hands ).
What about cartoon manipulation for artists
What about mirroring a common action for paper note-takers: you are inking a note in Journal or InkSeine, when you decide that you hate the idea that you've been working on. You take your hand and scrunch up the piece of "paper" in to a ball and throw it away. That brings the experience of note-taking even closer to mirroring real life, thanks to multi-touch.

These are all usage scenarios I could imagine conducting on my 12" Dell Latitude XT Tablet PC or even smaller devices like an OQO Model 02. The potential of multi-touch on a laptop / tablet pc screen is huge in the education space, and I think it is one of the most exciting things to develop in a long time. The 12" screen is perfect for all of these scenarios because they allow the student to take the device with them and use it a home, school, the lab, etc. Usability possibilities around multi-touch and laptop screens abound.

Multi-Touch | Touch

5/29/2008 12:00 AM MST

Multi-Touch Scenarios on a Tablet PC Comments [20] | Digg This | del.icio.us | Citations

Thursday, May 29, 2008 12:23:34 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

Another scenario where I see multi-touch on tablets to be very useful is in doctor's appointments. Expecially when working with kids - imagine the results of having the doctor and the child working together with a diagram to figure what hurts, where, and why. Even for adults, the ability to work together on the same computer with the doctor to report pain and measure it against other pain episodes would work much better with a touch screen than any current system. (Imagine it: A picture of your knee where you can point to the place it hurts and the doctor can show you what that pain affects besides just the joint.)

Kathy Jacobs

Thursday, May 29, 2008 12:26:26 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

Very creative ideas Rob! I would use some of those, too. I liked the image of the trumpet player blowing on his OQO.

ouzome

Thursday, May 29, 2008 1:45:54 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

Touchscreen tablets are good enough for Jack Bauer and his tactical teams in "24" to save the world from the bad guys...

Yang-May

Thursday, May 29, 2008 2:06:10 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

Is there a queue of app companies/developers champing at the bit to utilise this type of UI?

Mel

Thursday, May 29, 2008 3:19:17 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

As an XT user, I thought that the NTrig technology was capable of using the multi touch usage.

I read that it would just be a software update in the (near) future. Any more updates/news on that? When will XT users be able to use multi touch features that are imbedded in the N Trig tech?

Showing of nice candy like vids in youtube is one thing, making it usefull to the buyers of XT's apparantly is something else...

Tuur

Thursday, May 29, 2008 3:40:59 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

As usual, James is talking out of his hat; and as we all know, Texans have exceptionally large hats.

BIll

Thursday, May 29, 2008 4:44:26 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

I use a Smart Board in my math classroom. I often have several students trying to manipulate objects or write on it at the same time. This is a great tool for collaboration!

Tom Escott

Thursday, May 29, 2008 5:45:19 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

All good scenarios Rob and I agree that multi-touch could play a good role in the education space. I still don't see anything that could make a big difference in my day to day usage of Windows, though.

JK (talking through my large hat)

James Kendrick

Thursday, May 29, 2008 7:31:10 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

Rob: Fantastic list. I would also add the possibility of recognizing a two-finger tap as right-click as a simple but effective use of multi-touch. In the Windows 7 demo, I was rather disappointed to see right click was still activated by press-and-hold.

James: You have a point about your daily usage, but I am greatly disappointed that you have taken that tack. It is similar to the argument text-thinkers give against the pen as a useful input option. I don't their path is one you want to follow.

Sumocat

Thursday, May 29, 2008 8:18:25 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

@tuur - look for a driver update to be released that will provide multi-touch support to current xt owners. no word on dates, though. However, it will be backward compatible for current xt owners

@james - totally understand about your day to day usage. multi-touch will succeed in vertical markets for sure, but I believe there are definite usage scenarios that lend themselves well to normal day to day usage. Like Sumocat pointed out, multi-finger gestures to replace awkward things like press and hold or right click. What about a thumb / pinky press to launch an application, or a two index finger tap to rotate the screen, or a pinky / pinky tap to bring up the aero switcher. Squeeze the taskbar to make it smaller / bigger. Just a couple of examples where multi-touch could help do some really interesting things just with gestures.

Rob

Thursday, May 29, 2008 8:21:52 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

Sumo, it's not a tack I have taken. I have genuinely been asking for someone to come up with a daily usage I can make out of multi-touch. I use the heck out of multi-touch on my iPod Touch which is very effective on the small screen. I'm just trying to come up with something I do all the time on larger-screened devices that will benefit from it. So far all I hear are specialized usages, something that can always find benefit in special technology. I'm not saying the technology is not worth pursuing at all, just that I'd like to see innovative uses for it that will improve my user experience.

James Kendrick

Thursday, May 29, 2008 10:01:42 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

I think Sumo is on to something. If the screen had a soft left-middle-right click button which you could hold while tapping elsewhere this would be very useful.

The same would go for a context sensitive soft menu which popped up in response to certain actions. For example, lassoing a portion of the screen with your right hand could pop up a menu for your left thumb to select copy, translate, move, etc.

The other common use might be to define an area. Take two finger input to define a rectangular selection or multi-finger input to define a polygon (although this would be less useful outside of graphics).

The only other thing I can see is that a better recognition of multiple touches should lead to a better distinction between a stylus touch and a finger touch. With well written software it should be possible to dispense with the active digitizer and use the touch screen for inking.

Dave P

Thursday, May 29, 2008 10:20:57 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

James: I'm just saying that when you make a statement on "specialized usage", it strikes with me the same chord as the usual anti-tablet statements. Tablet PCs are often called "niche", "specialized", and the more polite "vertical", in ways meant to detract from their usefulness. Statements like these and lack of personal usefulness are often cited as negative marks against the form factor. I don't think you're against the technology, but you are approaching it from a negative direction.

That said, I don't think they showed us anything special in that Windows 7 demo. I was very disappointed there was no varied function for different finger combinations or gestures. I thought it looked quite useless as presented. I wouldn't blame most people for thinking it was useless. But most people look at tablets the same way, and, more importantly, you're not most people. I was surprised by your negative approach and what I see as parallels with the anti-tablet arguments, so really, my disappointment is a matter of different expectations more than anything else. I don't disagree with your points, just your apparent direction.

Sumocat

Thursday, May 29, 2008 10:36:10 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

Rob, Dave: let me go a step further with my vision and take a rather un-Sumocat stance - multi-touch should work like a keyboard. To clarify, a keyboard recognizes different points of contact. In a web browser, the left arrow key scrolls left. But when I hold down the alt key and hit the left arrow, the browser goes back a page. Multi-touch should give us that kind of functionality, except we'd have three on-screen buttons or designated areas for Ctrl, Shift, and Alt, and gestures instead of arrow keys. That's just one example, maybe not even a good one, but stuff like that will make it easier for keyboard users to make the jump to touchscreen. I had mentioned this elsewhere before, maybe in the forum. I'll ponder it further.

Sumocat

Thursday, May 29, 2008 4:06:56 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

I quite often find myself sense checking multiple datasets that with two windows open side by side. If I could use multi-touch to scroll through both windows at the same time it would make life a lot easier. What about swapping files in folders. If you could drag multiple files to different locations at the same time that would be very helpful. In a way, I guess I see multi-touch acting like multiple cursors in order to be useful on a daily basis.

By the way, I don't really like the trumpet situation because I doubt it would really help a trumpeter practice their fingering. An on-screen piano would work though :)

Jake

Thursday, May 29, 2008 5:56:33 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

James, I have actually been wondering the same thing. I even recently asked in the forums here if touch is worth it. (I am a fully devoted since first generation tableteer) The answers that I received were that people felt that the lack of software didn't make it that crucial at this point.

As for some of the senerios mentioned, I don't think they would be that valuable, especially those involving music. Perhaps on a beginner scale, (pun intended) but any serious musician might actually find it detrimental, certainly not that helpful.

I could envision some usage for desktop publishing though. Resizing graphics, text boxes and such and being able to adjust two dimensions at once could be very effective.

Just my 2c.

Brian

Thursday, May 29, 2008 8:15:18 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

Sumocat: How exactly would a double tap right click work? If I were trying to right-click on a link, would I have to have both fingers on the link, or would I choose one of two fingers to be on it? How would the computer know which of two links I was right-clicking on in a such a situation? It wouldn't be greatly intuitive to do this.

I have to agree with James that in business situations, it doesn't seem there is currently any sort of great application for multi-touch. This could however be for the simple fact that our current systems were designed around the keyboard and mouse. Perhaps if they were built from the ground up to work with multi-touch, then it would be more useful, however Apple seem to have tried this with the iPhone/iPod Touch, and with my iPod Touch the only uses multi-touch has are in image or web browsing, or in Google Maps, all of which are for zooming. Beyond that, there is no vital function which utilises that input.

Jonathan B

Thursday, May 29, 2008 8:28:31 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

I liken this kind of attitude to the days before Mice were around. All applications were built around a single input device, the keyboard, and everyone that could possibly be done on a computer could be done on a keyboard. Therefore, when these mice things came around, people said "What is the point of these? What can I do with these that I can't do with my keyboard?"

Today we're in a similar situation; applucations are built for a keyboard and mouse, so everything you can possibly do on a computer can be done with a keyboard and mouse. Therefore, people obviously raise the question "What is the point of multitouch? What can I do with it that I can't do with my keyboard and mouse?"

My point is that since we live and work in an environment where only 2 input methods are common, it's difficult to imagine what kind of applications will be written for future input devices.

Antimatter

Friday, May 30, 2008 7:44:48 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

Jonathan: First, double tap implies a double-click equivalent, so don't use that term. Two-finger means two fingers side-by-side.

Second, one finger, both fingers, either way people naturally aim for the center of a target. Extrapolating the midpoint between two points of contact is easy. That midpoint is the cursor equivalent. However, instead of recognizing a single point of contact, a circular area around that point is recognized as the point of contact. The link (or whatever) dominant in that area will be where the right-click is registered. The recognition is more complex than standard cursor control. While offering the equivalent of multiple cursors is a function of multi-touch, I believe it has more potential than that.

Sumocat

Friday, May 30, 2008 5:55:14 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

Hmm...an actual double tap with two fingers would be a good candidate for solving a problem I have using Google Earth with just touch: double click of the right mouse button or double tap with pen, holding down th pen right-click button is used to zoom out, but I have not found a finger equivalent.

gottasettle

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