A GREAT primer on Multi-touch is
here.
I'd love to bring back the conversation right back to the researched postings/musings/ (whining
) on iPhones and the like... but dam it Scoble, you've done it again: You had the chance to make a cracking interview, with a tech innovator,
Wilson and you're not thinking big picture.
If you've got 30 odd minutes, the interviews of Scoble and Wilson are Part I
here Part II
here and Part III
here
In part this links into the Lux thread
here
Short version of this post:
Scoble is missing out on the movements of Apple. Apple's implemented a huge commercial multi-touch product. Sold over 5 million of them. Aiming to sell a few million a month, via 70 odd countries this year...
Apple has already got the background for advanced multitouch. Take this as this post as a mix of blue-sky and future looking, but Apple could potentially move fast and hard into this market. Something about ACD's not being upgraded for so long, for me, hints to a move into this area. Might be a false negative, but humour it for this post.
Apple could add something to the iMacs. Or update them. They could turn an iMac into an all in one "Surface" tablet. Add a swinging screen arm - Normally screens tilt a bit anyhow, but what if you could tilt even more? Or use this tech on a tiltable 30 inch ACD? You'd have to work out the problem of balancing the weight over the range of the tilt, but that should be solvable. (As said
here - something akin to the G4 iMac)
When mentioning Office labs Plex/Flex interface, with the zoomable UI, and it's links with Surface and Wall displays, it makes you think what the patent "space" is there on the zooming tech. If you've seen ** then you can see how useful the technology is when it links into a multi-touch interface.
It's a shame that Andy Wilson can't really sell the key unique parts of the demos he has, as they haven't really done video demos of real life uses. (Designing snowboards anyone?). It doesn't do pressure unfortunately due to it's way of working (vs frustrated TIR etc).
I just have this inkling Apple basically has this at the sellable stage if it wanted to, or very close. It needs developers to make the hardware do things. The whole concept of going via 2 bridges - the Touch OS, and the non-touch OS, and how you could port or merge or something the Touch version back over to the desktop, beyond a simple ModBook type tablet.
Scoble also misses another point. Bearing in mind that there are about to be a BIG number of developers looking at ObjC, XCode, iPhone apps etc - any knowledge they have there, could potentially quickly shift over to the multi-touch interface on a desktop/tablet/laptop Mac, if Apple did the groundwork in making a Touch OS X for the desktop.
Boom!!! That'd then really increase the ranks of Apple application developers.
Long version
Scoble and others are only just waking up to the party that Apple is a-brewing. Tech writers like Jack at the Guardian and others are basically in the dark till the keynote. If papers lag the internet, the paper tech articles in general lag the internet articles. And they can lag the primary sources by hours - days - weeks. The analysts/investor information is better in the most-part, due to the $$ involved.
Part III - Showing what you could do with a low level depth perceiving camera. (Zcam hasn't shown this but presumably it would port to it). - how real objects can be sensed, their shape etc calculated, and added as a dynamic virtual object in the virtual world shown on a touch screen - and hence the representation of your hands for example, able to interact with virtual objects on the screen (water, ants, racing cars.) Kinda like an augmented reality version, without haptics (mmmm, haptics).
Could you do this with a front mounted webcam? ...
Why use Surface?
Wilson posits you could use it if you have:
- Lots of (dynamic) data
- Lots of documents
- Want multi-person access
Scoble notes he gets "too much noise", and that's fair enough, he, like others, recommend bigger screens for their
productivity ** (Spaces anyone?) Johnny, Perspective Pixels et al show this as having potential. I'd love to see a data crunching company show what they can do to this - making swing tables etc come to live. This kind of tech would bring to live Excel/Numbers - to meddle around with data via touch, to play with spreadsheet models via touch - a tasty concept. Slap a layer of Google's software to visualise data, and i'm sold.
Pt I 13 min in - Shows a video of objects shown, which then have a circle round them, and associated data (pictures, etc). "RFID Fusion" video (reshown at 17:30 with intro). You don't however need RFIDs. It'd be a clunky design, and products already have unique identifiers without adding more ones potentially unneccessarily (RFIDs could complement the system of identification, not be the primary one).
14 minutes in - The big bang of UI design. Scoble doesn't scream to Wilson: "Hasn't Apple just had that big bang?" The irony is there when Wilson talks about Surface tech, working away separate to other parts of Microsoft, not knowing that they're creating a UI that could potentially power a future Windows (7? 8?)
But from Apple's roadmap, the whole redesigning of OS X to incorporate Touch from the ground up - it begs to be reimplemented on a Desktop level. Has Johnny Ive been working on swing arm ACDs, so they cab become desktop touch screens? I wonder...
Apple is potentially easily able to move into larger or smaller versions (from projection versions to ultra-portable versions), higher res, sophisticated object recognition.
Scoble touches on at one point, the concept of Docking your phone, then drag files or objects to and from it. But as we already know, the iPhone doesn't have to be touching a screen to do this. Like the Garmin Forerunner, you just drop it on your desktop, get it autosynced/say yes to sync, and play around with dragging any files between iPhone and desktop.
The concept of using syncing between an iPhone and desktop, also relates in a much broader way to laptop to laptop sharing, desktop to laptop, iPhone to iPhone. Maybe Apple isn't going to bring this, but the reason why using the iPhone as a hard drive hasn't come, is because they've been hard at work at the implementation of a much grander schema.
23 minutes in - "Touchlight" screen - Transparent rear projection screen Wiki
here
Touchlight was touched upon on Scoble's previous video at ...
Scoble again touches on great topics - how to get the consumer to adopt the technology/buy the device - that a lot of what Wilson is demonstrating is totally creatable currently with current technology, but that you need standards, and consumers need to see a value proposition - There needs to be interest in the concepts, the potential has to be simply shown to users, to ignite curiousity, interest, lust...
26 minutes in - Wilson has wants, and surely MacBook Air's multi-touch touches upon what Wilson wants (Zcam does it too).
The area of how to signal pinching or clicking event gesture if your hand movements are constantly being monitored is interesting, with the concept of just having a downward facing webcam sounding awfully like certain Apple patents.
Microsoft Surface
- From the
wiki
- A multi-touch product from Microsoft. A software & hardware combination technology that allows a user or users, to manipulate content via contact with the screen (finger(s) to screen, RFID(s) to screen contact)
- The motion can then be analysed for gestures, motion etc.
- Announced May 29, 2007 at D5 conference
- Preliminary launch on April 17, 2008 when it became available for customer use in AT&T stores.
(the irony if Apple comes out with a rival, and ousts Microsoft's Surface tech from AT&T stores...)
So you take a Vista PC inside a table, put a 30-inch reflective surface in a clear acrylic frame. Underneath the surface you have a projector that projects its imagine onto the surface's underside. Cameras check for and analyse reflections of IR light from objects (I'm not sure if it can distinguish between fingers and say, a pencil at this point). RFID tagged objects can be identified also.
The level of visual identification is progressing, - it can ID a fair bit from any flattish object, and as shown by the previous post on Google's Where *** video - Barcode/object identification is coming on leaps and bounds. They could easily link up a webcam specifically to ID objects and then bring a visualisation of them onto the screen. In terms of using something like this for sales, RFID tagged credit cards are easily possible (see oyster cards, petrol cards etc etc), and you could easily plug a chip and pin reader to one of these screens...
Cost? $5,000 - 10,000 a pop. Microsoft expects prices to drop to consumer versions feasible come 2010.
source I claim BS. This is a blue sky post - i'm seeing this is feasible by August this year via hacks, Apple, some apps etc.
Say multi-touch started around 1982 with the Flexible Machine Interface. If you take 25 odd years for the mouse to come to fruition, I think there are a fair number of users who think it's time is here. Note Fingerworks (1998 on the timeline) is now Apple's.
For Surface, the product idea concept came around 2001. by Steven Bathiche (Microsoft Hardware) and Andy Wilson (Microsoft Research)
Source
Passed the concept by Gates in 2003, completed a final hardware design completed ~2005.
The main parts are
- direct interaction
- multi-touch contact
- object recognition.
- a multi-user experience
Come the App store, The 1st 3 will be available to iPhone users. I just have this big feeling, once this starts selling, it's going to explode onto the marketplace. Stuff like
this hints at it.
Sidenote: Why is it that so few people have picked up on the whole container ship deliveries, and the actual dates of shipping? If they are iPhones, how does that jive with the manufacture of the chips inside it? Container loads of one more thing?And for crying out loud, what weighs 10kg these days? It ain't like Wiki doesn't already give you accurate weights of the most well used freight containers.
A Mac Pro weighs ~19.2 kg. ~ 12 kg gets you a 30 inch ACD. 7kg gets you a 23 incher ACD. MBP is only 3 kg. iMac? 9/11.5kg.
7140 kg for 504 units (I think this is inc. container weight) But = 14 kg if it doesn't. If it were to do with screeens, you might see a lot more refurb ACDs soon. only 504 a container? Somethings fishy. Does 504 = Per Pallet? Seems to be 504 containers...
