Hasta La Gadget!

Apple’s new MacBook Air borrows a lot of things from the iPad, including hyperportability and instant-on flash storage. But the Air won’t use an iPad-like touchscreen. Neither will any of Apple’s laptops. That’s because of what designers call “gorilla arm.”

And while Apple points to its own research on this problem, it’s a widely recognized issue that touchscreen researchers have known about for decades.

“We’ve done tons of user testing on this,” Steve Jobs said in Wednesday’s press conference, “and it turns out it doesn’t work. Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical. It gives great demo, but after a short period of time you start to fatigue, and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off.”

This why Jobs says Apple’s invested heavily in developing multitouch recognition for its trackpads, both for its laptops, on its current-generation Mighty Mouse and on its new standalone Magic Trackpad.

Avi Greengart of Current Analysis agrees it’s a smart move, borne out of wisdom gathered from watching mobile and desktop users at work.

“Touchscreen on the display is ergonomically terrible for longer interactions,” he says. “So, while touchscreens are popular, Apple clearly took what works and is being judicious on how they are taking ideas from the mobile space to the desktop.”

But Apple didn’t have to do its own user testing. They didn’t even have to look at the success or failure of existing touchscreens in the PC marketplace. Researchers have documented usability problems with vertical touch surfaces for decades.

“Gorilla arm” is a term engineers coined about 30 years ago to describe what happens when people try to use these interfaces for an extended period of time. It’s the touchscreen equivalent of carpal-tunnel syndrome. According to the New Hacker’s Dictionary, “the arm begins to feel sore, cramped and oversized — the operator looks like a gorilla while using the touchscreen and feels like one afterwards.”

According to the NHD, the phenomenon is so well-known that it’s become a stock phrase and cautionary tale well beyond touchscreens: “‘Remember the gorilla arm!’ is shorthand for ‘How is this going to fly in real use?’.” You find references to the “gorilla-arm effect” or “gorilla-arm syndrome” again and again in the scholarly literature on UI research and ergonomics, too.

There are other problems with incorporating touch gestures on laptops, regardless of their orientation. Particularly for a laptop as light as the MacBook Air, continually touching and pressing the screen could tip it over, or at least make it wobble. This is one reason I dislike using touchscreen buttons on cameras and camera phones — without a firm grip, you introduce just the right amount of shake to ruin a photo.

Touchscreens work for extended use on tablets, smartphones and some e-readers because you can grip the screen firmly with both hands, and you have the freedom to shift between horizontal, vertical and diagonal orientations as needed.

On a tablet or smartphone, too, the typing surface and touch surface are almost always on the same plane. Moving back and forth between horizontal typing and vertical multitouch could be as awkward as doing everything on a vertical screen.

This doesn’t mean that anything other than a multitouch trackpad won’t work. As Microsoft Principal Researcher (and multitouch innovator) Bill Buxton says, “Everything is best for something and worst for something else.”

We’ve already seen vertical touchscreens and other interfaces working well when used in short bursts: retail or banking kiosks, digital whiteboards and some technical interfaces. And touchscreen computing is already well-implemented in non-mobile horizontal interfaces, like Microsoft’s Surface. Diagonalized touchscreen surfaces modeled on an architect’s drafting table like Microsoft’s DigiDesk concept are also very promising.

In the near future, we’ll see even more robust implementations of touch and gestural interfaces. But it’s much more complex than just slapping a capacitative touchscreen, however popular they’ve become, into a popular device and hoping that they’ll work together like magic.

Design at this scale, with these stakes, requires close and careful attention to the human body — not just arms, but eyes, hands and posture — and to the context in which devices are used in order to find the best solution in each case.

See Also:

• New MacBook Air Disses Adobe Flash
• Apple Unleashes New MacBook Airs
• Hands-On With Apple's New MacBook Airs
• Video: Command and Control Robots with Microsoft Surface
• Thin Film Turns Any Surface Into a Touchscreen
• Beyond the iPad: Massive MultiTouch Displays Have Big Social …
• Apple's Magic Trackpad Brings Multi-Touch to the Desktop

While we’ve given up on ever winning an online match of StarCraft II, that doesn’t mean top-down unit control schemes are only for nerds in their mom’s basement with their cheap rush tactics and Cheeto fingers and obscene triple digit APMs (we’re not bitter or anything). In fact, we kind of like the look of this robot control interface, developed at UMass Lowell by Mark Micire as part of his PhD research. The multitouch UI puts Microsoft Surface to good use, with gestures and contextual commands that make operating an unruly group of robots look easy, and a console-inspired touch control setup for operating a single bot from a first person perspective as well. There are a couple videos after the break, the first is Mike operating an army of virtual robots, using Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio to simulate his soldiers and environment, but the second shows his first person UI guiding a real robot through a maze, in what amounts to a very, very expensive version of that Windows 95 maze screensaver.

Continue reading Multi-robot command center built around Microsoft Surface (video)

Multi-robot command center built around Microsoft Surface (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 28 Aug 2010 17:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Intel’s mind reading computer could bring thought controlled interfaces to a whole new, frightening level originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Tom Cruise’s virtual info-surfing in the film Minority Report is often cited as the ideal future for information interactivity. The film is pretty horrendous, but who wouldn’t want to surf the Web (let alone some psychic’s brainwaves) like that? A true TCMR (Tom Cruise Minority Report)  has come closer to reality with the work of a researcher from from the National Taiwan University in Taipei.

The researcher, Li-Wei Chan, has created a projected tabletop interface that will interact with a user and even allow multiple users to interact with one setup. It’s like a gigantic touch-screen interface that will allow various users to extract information they want via hand gestures or other devices, created via a single projector.

Words don’t do it justice. Check the video.

Now scientists just need get in gear bringing Jurassic Park to life. It’s been like 17 years. I was expecting to have my own triceratops by now. Get on that, science!

Via newscientist

Entelligence is a column by technology strategist and author Michael Gartenberg, a man whose desire for a delicious cup of coffee and a quality New York bagel is dwarfed only by his passion for tech. In these articles, he’ll explore where our industry is and where it’s going — on both micro and macro levels — with the unique wit and insight only he can provide.

One of the more recent trends in UI design has been the attempt to make the digital appear analog. It arguably started with the NeXT OS, which had photorealistic icons and used clever grayscale techniques to give three-dimensional depth to windows, scroll bars and other elements. Today, Apple’s iPhone compass app looks like it might be more at home on an 18th-century clipper ship, and the voice recorder app looks at home in a recording studio somewhere around 1950 — tap on the “microphone” and the VU meter will react much as it would in real life. Google’s added subtle 3D effects to Android’s app scrolling. I haven’t thought that much about this trend until I recently spent some time using Windows Phone 7.

It’s perhaps a minor issue but one of the things I like about WP7 is that it’s not a digital UI pretending to be analog. The user interface is flat. There are no photorealistic depictions of real world items, no shading, and no 3D effects. Everything is conveyed through the use of fonts, shapes and color. It’s digital and it’s proud. Overall, I like it, and the more I use it, the more I prefer it. Returning to a more digital approach means Microsoft was able to rethink the nature of applications and services and create the concept of hubs, where like functions meet similar functions without the need for separate applications. It takes some getting used to, but the more I use it, the more natural it feels.

Continue reading Entelligence: Let’s get digital

Entelligence: Let’s get digital originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 01 Aug 2010 20:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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