Touchscreens have no hand • Hacker News Board

Re: Touchscreens have no hand

#11

Post by cageface » Tue, Nov 15, 2011, 12:14 PM UTC

dolle wrote: post #5

cageface wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the fundamental problem isn't one of emulation, it's the lack of any kind of tactile feedback. I write music software and there's a world of difference between a real knob on a synthesizer or a real piano key and any representation you put on a screen. Touchscreens have unique strengths and weaknesses.

I'm totally with you. After I've aquired a smartphone (HTC Desire), I've come to the conclusion that the only thing that touchscreens are good for is scrolling. I hate writing on it, I hate pushing buttons and links, I hate that the virtual objects that I interact with gets occluded by my fingers, I hate that I have to hold my phone in awkward ways so I don't accidentally "push" virtual "buttons". Many of these irrit…

I think touchscreens are going to become the cheap, ubiquitous, lowest-common-denominator interface for general tasks. But I agree that they're really not that interesting for anything more than browsing. You'll notice that most apps don't go far beyond basic tap, pan, swipe and pinch gestures because anything more complex is too awkward and error-prone. That leaves a lot of the expressive potential of the human hand untapped.

Re: Touchscreens have no hand

#12

Post by hessenwolf » Tue, Nov 15, 2011, 12:31 PM UTC

gbog wrote: post #10

The problem for me is about how we input something in the machine. iPad, Kindle, etc. are wonderful for consuming content, and this can probably be done efficiently enough with touchscreen interfaces. But producing content is one important part of the deal (specially for guys like Tufte), and in this activity the physical grain of the interface become prominent. In my dream, I would have a phone-like thing, small eno…

Can you just add in a laser keyboard there? Handwriting is slow and my hand gets sore.

Re: Touchscreens have no hand

#13

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Nov 15, 2011, 12:57 PM UTC

Tsagadai wrote: post #2

This is just a part of the world of impersonal mass production. Make everything the same. I sometimes wonder if electronics would benefit more from the world of welding and construction where the maker often leaves their personal mark somewhere on the finished product. Many hands went into the construction of a tablet but each is almost identical and has almost no hints as to its origin or the mood of the assembly li…

[deleted]

Re: Touchscreens have no hand

#14

Post by icebraining » Tue, Nov 15, 2011, 1:20 PM UTC

Why do I get the feeling he's telling me to get off his lawn? I found Bret Victor's article informative and inspiring. This just feels like a grumpy rant, and it adds nothing.

On the matter of digital surfaces, I found the description of an object which changed surfaces in Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth fascinating. It essentially "worked" by transmitting electric pulses through the skin that simulated the feelings - the actual object didn't change. I wonder if there's research in that area.

Re: Touchscreens have no hand

#15

Post by tel » Tue, Nov 15, 2011, 2:47 PM UTC

frankPants wrote: post #3

I am at odds to argue with Tufte but I will. The issue with touch screens is not that they lack the same surface texture as the objects they're imitating. It's that they're imitating real world objects in the first place. I think most people would agree with sculpture and painting, that the high point of those media was reached during the point of pure abstraction. When paint was allowed to simply be paint. Painting…

This has been Tufte's point since long before iPhones and iPads made touch screens so popular. He wrote a whole book called "Escaping Flatland" after all.

It's not at all that he doesn't appreciate the potential of pixels---he's been a long advocate of pushing them to perform at the levels he desires---but instead that he believes that the information lost in graphs, charts, interfaces is incredible. He is constantly studying methods to attain significant data density in graphic representation.

His argument here is that we have so many sensory signals we pay attention to naturally and garner great amounts of information from. Touch screens manage to interact with just one or two of them.

It ends quaintly, too. Not with a call to arms to improve touchscreens, but more like Brett Victor's essay, with a call to remember to appreciate the physicality of the world.

Re: Touchscreens have no hand

#16

Post by frankPants » Tue, Nov 15, 2011, 10:22 PM UTC

jacobolus wrote: post #9

frankPants wrote: post #3

I am at odds to argue with Tufte but I will. The issue with touch screens is not that they lack the same surface texture as the objects they're imitating. It's that they're imitating real world objects in the first place. I think most people would agree with sculpture and painting, that the high point of those media was reached during the point of pure abstraction. When paint was allowed to simply be paint. Painting…

> the high point of [painting and sculpture] was reached during the point of pure abstraction On what criteria do you base this assessment? What’s an example of “pure” abstraction? Do e.g. the impressionists make the cut, or are they too representational to be part of the “high point”? What about Rodin?

I'd go with either Mondrian, or Pollock myself. Impressionists, such as Monet began working towards abstraction for sure, but for Monet, it was more about capturing the fleeting nature of light on a canvas, however still within the confines of a landscape.

Surely painting as a pure form of expression, unbridled by anything more than simply paint, reached it's high point with the likes of Mondrian, Pollock, Kandinsky etc during the early 20th century. When composition, colour and form were key and principle elements of the canvas, not nature, and the natural world around. They may have drawn inspiration from the world around but they did not seek to visual represent it on the canvas per se.