Posts tagged Multitouch

I dare say the biggest issue with multitouch interfaces today is the loss of the ability to “hover”. Whether you look at iphones or MS Surface, your finger is either on or off the display. There’s no hover or inbetween, and there certainly is no degree or percentage of touching. ON/OFF makes it difficult to design for these kinds of interfaces. Having worked on and heard about multiple interfaces using these kinds of surfaces, designers always seem to struggle with being able to give users the ability to “hover”. Options that the user has available either need to always be visible, or they need to have some extra step to display or un-display their options.

The idea of having touch interfaces that can tell the degree to which the user is touching them has been around for a while, but every implementation so far has been costly and too large to be realistically used in portable or consumer devices.

Cue new research findings from New York University! They have created a technology called “Inexpensive Multi-Touch Pressure Acquisition Devices” (IMPAD). Tthe IMPADs can be created to be extremely thin, and can scale from small portable devices up to large wall or table screens. The researchers are going to present IMPAD at the Computer Human Interaction conference this weekend.

IMPAD - Credit: Ilya Rosenberg, Alexander Grau, Charles Hendee, Nadim Awad, Ken Perlin (from http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22358/page1/)

The screens use layers of plastics with parallel lines of electrodes to measure both where and how hard the user is pressing the interface. Importantly, the plastic is coated in a layer of force sensitive resistor ink. When the ink is pressed, tiny conductive bumps are pushed together and conduct electricity. Crucially, the harder that this ink is compressed, the more it conducts so it can be used to measure the degree to which the user is pressing.

The amazing thing about this new technology is that not only does it solve the issue of hovering on a touch screen, it creates some new and exciting possibilities for some very new interactions using the pressure readings. Apparently the inventors have already created demonstrations of painting, sculpting, and musical instrument playing using the interface, but the possibilities could be endless. Anything that we do now using the pressure of our fingers can be translated to a touchscreen display.

My only worry about this type of interface is whether or not the user can receive feedback about the pressure that they are putting on the surface. If there is no give in the screen, the force that is being placed on it could be difficult to know. Either a tactile feedback, or some kind of visual/auditory feedback would need to be created to make sure that the user knows what they are doing to the interface.

Either way, extremely cool. Wish I could go to the conference, and I can’t wait to see where this goes in the future!

You can view an amazing video of the touchpad interface at http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=290.