We’ve seen some interesting large-scalemultitouch products from SMART lately, but the company’s bread and butter is still the SMART Board interactive whiteboard, and it’s getting a neat little upgrade today: touch recognition. The board now intelligently senses the difference between a pen and your hand, so you can draw with the pen, move objects with your finger, and erase with the palm of your hand all at the same time — no tool switching required. It’s just a little tweak, sure, but it’s the stuff like this that’s going to make touch a viable primary interface — check out a video after the break.
I installed Windows 7 Beta on an HP TouchSmart PC over the weekend, getting cozy with the new touch and multitouch features, then loaded up a sweet two-handed Air Hockey demo. Have a look:
The basic touch and multitouch actions found native to Windows 7 are nothing to oooh and ahhh over, but there are a lot of little intuitive moves and conveniences that work well, even in the beta stage. More importantly, developers in and out of Microsoft are now getting all touchy, and we plan to track that pretty closely. But first, here’s the starter menu of touch and multitouch maneuvers:
Tap: The quick screen touch doesn’t reveal an arrow cursor, but the screen ripples outward, like water, plus there’s a tiny crosshair where you are actually tapping. The TouchSmart makes a beep (and when you tap with a second finger at the same time, that touch emits a higher-pitch beep).
Tap and hold: The “right-click” behavior is very well constructed: You tap and hold, and a circle swirls around your finger. Let go to reveal the right-click menu.
Flick: When you enable flicks, you can swim through longer pages and menus a lot faster, both vertically and horizontally. When you reach the end of the menu or screen, the window recoils a bit, indicating the termination.
Type: There’s a surprisingly MacBooky on-screen keyboard lurking just off frame in Windows 7. You tap the screen’s edge for it to stick out just a bit; tap it again and out it slides to center screen, sizable to your fat-fingered liking.
Zoom: In spite of new concerns over multitouch patents, this zoom behavior is pretty much identical to the one seen in Apple products (and on Microsoft’s Surface as well). You put two fingers on the screen and move them together to zoom out, and separate them to zoom in. I will note that this was easier to do with two hands—one-handed pinching was probably too micro for the TouchSmart screen.
Rotate: Same as zoom, this is straight out of the basic multitouch playbook. Just move two fingers in a circular fashion, and the photo rotates. And again, it was easier to use two hands than one. (I found that amazing bee shot in the video on Flickr—it’s by a user called aussiegall who has some beautiful nature close-ups.)
Draw: Two-fingered drawing is a multitouch phenomenon I don’t fully understand, but that’s probably because I’m not much of an artist. It’s cool to show off—and at this point, it’s the epitome of the finger Paint interface, because three or more fingers is still apparently taboo—but it seems to be a function awaiting a purpose.
The Windows 7 Media Center touch interface is really cool, especially if you’re using MC in a cramped dorm or kitchen, where the “10 foot” remote-control experience just ain’t happening. I ran the following video back in November, showing pretty much the same experience I can now pull up on the TouchSmart I have here, only they had more content, so it looks cooler:
A multitouch interface designer called IdentityMine created, among other things, a simple two-person multitouch Air Hockey demo to run at PDC 2008. Since it’s still available for download, I grabbed it and challenged my wife to a duel. We’re both out of shape, hockey-wise, but man was it a bloodbath:
In case you were wondering, I installed Windows 7 Beta in two ways on the TouchSmart PC, both which had different advantages. First, I upgraded from Vista, keeping all the drivers, etc. intact. Though I was able to get going quickly, the experience was hampered by touch software that HP ran on top of Vista. To get at the control that come native in Windows 7—which I highlight above—I had to partition the drive and do a clean install. Though I had to gather up some drivers and install them manually with some trickery, I got the more honest Windows 7 touch and multitouch experience.
I am happy that HP is pushing its TouchSmart platform to consumers with such enthusiasm, and I’m happy that Microsoft decided to weave touch into the fabric of its OS. One day we may even take it for granted, like keyboards and mice now. The real question is, what will developers do? I’m going to spend the next few days investigating more touch and multitouch applications and interfaces, because while Microsoft and HP should be praised for supplying the capabilities, the goodness will come in what developers do with them.
It took a couple of days for this to surface, but it looks like Apple was awarded yet another patent last week–a big one. Awarded on January 20, the company scored patent number 7,479,949, which was applied for on April 18 of last year. The patent covers multi-touch functionality like pinch, rotation, and swipe.
World of Apple has the text from the patent titled “Touch screen device, method, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics.”
It begins,
A computer-implemented method for use in conjunction with a computing device with a touch screen display comprises: detecting one or more finger contacts with the touch screen display, applying one or more heuristics to the one or more finger contacts to determine a command for the device, and processing the command. The one or more heuristics comprise: a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a one-dimensional vertical screen scrolling command, a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a two-dimensional screen translation command, and a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a command to transition from displaying a respective item in a set of items to displaying a next item in the set of items.
Does this spell disaster for the forthcoming Palm Pre–the device to which most assumed Apple’s temporary CEO, Tim Cook, was referring to when he recently made veiled legal threats?
As our mobile analyst Sascha Segan would (and will no doubt continue to) say, “There. Is. More. Than. One. Multi. Touch. Patent.”
HTC has announced the Touch Cruise, a new TouchFLO-enhanced Windows Mobile smartphone featuring HTC Footprints, a new geotagging feature that lets users tag photos with GPS location data and audio clips. The Touch Cruise also includes a car cradle that, when docked, automatically switches the device to a turn-by-turn navigation mode—a useful feature for anyone who has struggled with their handset’s UI and tiny buttons when getting in and out of the car.
The Touch Cruise comes with Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capability, a microSD card slot, and—oddly, for a TouchFLO device—just QVGA (320-by-240-pixel) resolution instead of full VGA mode. HTC will sell the device in the U.S. unlocked as a dual-mode (850/1900 MHz) HSDPA phone, with HSDPA 7.2 and 2100 MHz capability overseas.
I’m not a huge TouchFLO fan, since it sits somewhat uneasily on top of the usual Windows Mobile UI. But I look forward to checking out HTC Footprints and the Touch Cruise’s improved voice navigation mode. Expect it to hit stores in Spring 2009 for between $500 and $600.
As we saw during CES, Microsoft is getting series about multi-touch technology with Window 7. That’s good news Israel-based N-trig, the company behind DuoSense, a technology aimed at bring pen- and capacitive-touch to the same device.
The company announced today that has raised $24 million from investors, including Aurum Ventures, Challenger Ltd., Canaan Partners, Evergreen Venture Partners, and the folks in Redmond.
“With the introduction of multi-touch in Windows 7, integrated with N-trig’s DuoSense technology, our customers will have a new and natural way to interact with their PCs,” said Microsoft’s Ian LeGrow. “By simulating the way people write and touch naturally, N-trig is helping to make it easier to navigate your PC and enable a new class of Windows experiences.”
HTC’s Touch Diamond and QWERTY-packin’ Touch Pro have run into some stiff competition here in the US of A, but as Adam Smith would certify, all that competition is only for the best. Now that you’ve seen what these two can do, not to mention their rivals, we’re wondering how you would change whichever handset it is (of these two, obviously) that you own. Implement a Touch HD-style display? Load it up with Android? Round those edges a bit more? Add a bigger battery at the expense of style? Say it loud, say it proud, say it down in comments below.
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