Kevin McGuire

The keyboard/mouse combination is fine for primarily typing tasks, but the depth of interaction and expression they offer is pretty poor. The places where we see the most innovation are in music and gaming. Musicians are pushing this because they are coming from a tactile world (keyboards, guitar strings, etc). Gamers are pushing it because it increases the depth of immersion (especially force feedback) and perhaps gives you an edge of your competition.

In the music world, the coolest solution I’ve seen is the Lemur/Dexter by Jazz Mutant, a multi-touch (can use more than one finger at same time) sensitive display with dedicated software for creating virtual input devices (sliders, dials, etc.), outputting midi. The physics model allows for the creation of some unusual input paradigms such as bouncing balls and elastic bands. I’d love to give one of these a spin but the 2,100 € price tag is pretty serious.

But what about the poor graphic artist? They’re coming from a tactile world too where the finess of how you hold a nd manipulate a brush is intrinsic in your artistic expression. We’re starting to see more pen based laptops but most have a relatively low resolution (typically 1024×768) and require you to sacrifice processing power for the convenience of a pen based input. And besides, what if I already have a computer such as a desktop and just want to swap how I interact?

Enter the Wacom Cintiq, a 21″ 1600×1200 LCD screen with pressure sensitive pen for use with any computer. This looks like a lot of fun. The touch bars provide additional direct input allowing zooming/panning/etc. At $2500US it doesn’t come cheap, but if your world is about doing computer based graphics then it could make sense. One fun bonus is that there is no raised bezel so you can use real world objects (such as french curves) to trace on top of it.

If you want to go big though, you could consider the Smart Board line. They offer integrated back projected, front projected, or my personal favorite, overlay over existing LCD/plasma screen. An advantage of the Smart Board line is that you can either use one of their digitizing pens or your finger. We’ve played with the front projected version of this, programming music with Ableton Live and found the experience to be extremely fluid and interactive, to the point where we were using the software differently. That’s the true measure of the power of a change in interaction device. The only downside was the rather interesting contortions required to interact without blocking the projector. A close+high mounted projector with wide angle and good keystone control starts to overcome this. To this end, Smart Board has an integrated solution with a boom and projector. Notable mention should go to 3M which has a similar product although I’ve never tried it. Clearly the better solution is the more expensive overlay, although in combination with an 1080p LCD tv could be quite nice.

The ergonomic advantage of all these is clear. The tablet devices require wider motions of the hands and arms, using larger muscle sets in a variety of patterns. That’s a great RSI buster. The most intriguing though is the wall board approach because it forces you to get up out of those crappy chairs and move around! What a wonderful combination when making music.

Its great to see the products coming out but the prices need to become more approachable for us to see any kind of revolution in how we interact with our computers. Eventually though we want to see more and richer multi-touch input devices. Because, after all, we humans have more than one finger!

This entry was posted Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 2:39 pm and is filed under Ergonomics, Technology. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.