Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Buttons that morph out of the surface of the device.

tactustechnology.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 95 posts

Re: Buttons that morph out of the surface of the device.

#61

Post by reneherse »

run4yourlives wrote: post #45
reneherse wrote: post #40

This will be huge for automotive touchscreen applications: I have no doubt it will save lives. With current touchscreen interfaces, you rely almost solely on visual cues and feedback to make correct inputs. Not a good situation while driving, when you need as much visual attention as possible focused on the road. The best interfaces for operating complex or dangerous machines have fixed, haptically identifiable refer…

Similar to kiba's comment below, but perhaps a step in between, it would make sense for car designers to look at other similarly complex machines that require the operator's constant attention to the outside world before innovating blindly. HOTAS (Hands on Throttle and Stick) as a concept has been adopted almost exclusively in fighter aircraft - and extended into Formula 1 and Indy cars as well - for this exact purpo…

I very much agree that dashboard design is generally awful. As controls have become more digital and less mechanical, they seem to have come to require more attention. For instance, one general pattern used to be if you wanted warm air you slid a horizontal lever more or less to the right or left. Once you got used to it, you could set it without looking, and with gloves on.

Nowadays it's much more likely that you spin a knob or repeatedly press a button to set the temperature, and instead of the setting being indicated by a combination of position and color/text, you likely have only a numeric value, an exclusively visual indicator.

Not only does the digital, numeric value (usually in degrees F or C) provide a (possibly) unneeded level of precision, it's a visual-attention sink.

The "glass cockpit" of the Tesla I have to believe is even worse in this context. However, given its extreme versatility, I doubt the touchscreen will be going away. If a screen interface can be designed to require less attention, and I believe it can be, it's possible that we can gain all the promised flexibility of glass without it becoming a safety hazard.

Thanks for the HOTAS reference, btw. Hadn't heard of that.

Re: Buttons that morph out of the surface of the device.

#63

Post by sanjiallblue »

saulrh wrote: post #39
earbitscom wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bummer. Now, that is classic. I remember using public payphones just a little over a decade ago. One time some kids had put Vaseline on the earpiece. That was a fun time. Now we have a phone in our pocket that we can talk to and have it do nearly anything. By next year, it will have buttons when we want and no buttons when we don't. Vaseline on your ear is a bummer. This button-no-button stuff is not a bummer.

It's a bit of a bummer because it's trivial and boring. It almost looks like it's just a touchscreen with pockets on the front that you blow compressed air into. The fact that this is getting so much attention - and the fact that it's wasting some of our time in the process - is kind of annoying.

I feel like people like you complained when the first computers were invented because they were slow. This is haptic technology progressing and just the fact that it's getting major media attention is amazing since on-demand haptic feedback is the biggest presence missing from digital technology. Touch is just such a fundamental part of the human experience that anything that advances the technology that gets us to that implementation should be celebrated and here you are declaring it annoying?

It boggles the mind...

Re: Buttons that morph out of the surface of the device.

#64

Post by reneherse »

Schwolop wrote: post #37
akavi wrote: post #3

Judging by the video, it looks like the layout of the buttons is fixed, only their presence is toggleable. If so, that's a bit of a bummer.

I tend to agree with you on this. It's a great idea, but not an amazing idea. And the reason is simply that we can think of what a better version would look like - polymorphic buttons. I wonder if that's actually a good criteria for defining game changing innovation - that you can't think what a better version would look like.

I've personally been fantasizing about improved tactile touchscreen features since the iPad came out, but that didn't change the fact that it was a "game changing device". So I suspect that's not a great standard to judge by.

The fact is that every step in technology allows you to see farther ahead. To complain that the mountain you stand on isn't as tall as the one it allows you to see is ridiculous.

Re: Buttons that morph out of the surface of the device.

#65

Post by solnyshok »

andrejewski wrote: post #19

Very interesting and a bit scary. Think about it, a screen that can reach out and change its shape. That almost guarantees some (software) application misuse if they are given access to screen control. But on the other hand, gaming would be more interesting with something more to interact with than just what is displayed on screen. It will be interesting to see what becomes of this.

I expect a rogue app, that, upon detecting that phone is laying with its display down, starts to move the phone by imitating snake's muscles. and phone runs for the exit and beyond!

Re: Buttons that morph out of the surface of the device.

#66

Post by _delirium »

GiraffeNecktie wrote: post #15
_delirium wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might have to go 20 years to find that kind of difference. A decade ago, at least among the techie Americans that are the typical HN reference point, we had PalmPilot smartphones. Now we have some other brand of smartphones. Soon to have magical buttons, but otherwise not that huge of a revolution. The #1 thing to do with them a decade ago was to browse Google Maps and restaurant-review sites while away f…

We definitely were NOT browsing Google maps on our smartphones a decade ago.

Good point. :) However, there were maps on the Palm, just from a different vendor. Probably MapQuest, now that I think of it. The main point is that, imo, there was a step change when it became possible to find directions/restaurant info away from a computer. Now it's a bit more convenient, but just an incremental change in comparison.

In any case, it's certainly not the case that 2002 was some ancient era where we all used payphones, at least not in the West. That's hyperbole at best.

Re: Buttons that morph out of the surface of the device.

#67

Post by _delirium »

Ogre wrote: post #43
majormajor wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The earliest I had Google (or any) maps on my phone was 6 years ago.

I had a phone with a terrible web browser, a tiny screen, and ridiculous charges for bandwidth before that. MapQuest likely had a terrible mobile site for it to talk to. I think it's likely that I theoretically had maps on my phone 8, 9, or even 10 years ago. In practice though, I didn't have them until June 2007.

Maps worked fine on the Palm. Not as nice as today's maps, but they were sufficient. Also, Sprint introduced a reasonably priced uncapped plan around 2002 or 2003 or so, coinciding with the introduction of one of the Treo models, so there wasn't really a data-charges problem. In fact, the data plans got worse for a period later in the decade. There was a time in the late-2000s when Sprint re-introduced per-MB bandwidth charges, except that Palm phones were grandfathered in on the old plan, so you got unlimited data on Palm, but not on anything else.

It's true that uptake has increased over the last decade, though. Partly due to product improvements, but I think largely due to cultural changes.

Re: Buttons that morph out of the surface of the device.

#68

Post by saulrh »

sanjiallblue wrote: post #63
saulrh wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit of a bummer because it's trivial and boring. It almost looks like it's just a touchscreen with pockets on the front that you blow compressed air into. The fact that this is getting so much attention - and the fact that it's wasting some of our time in the process - is kind of annoying.

I feel like people like you complained when the first computers were invented because they were slow. This is haptic technology progressing and just the fact that it's getting major media attention is amazing since on-demand haptic feedback is the biggest presence missing from digital technology. Touch is just such a fundamental part of the human experience that anything that advances the technology that gets us to t…

This isn't a prototype computer. This is a prototype relay that can only open. If they'd given their engineers just two more months they'd have been able to show off a grid of pixels - something that would work in multiple orientations with arbitrary UI elements. Show me the full relay and an adder and I'll be happy.

Re: Buttons that morph out of the surface of the device.

#69

Post by ollysb »

reneherse wrote: post #61
run4yourlives wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar to kiba's comment below, but perhaps a step in between, it would make sense for car designers to look at other similarly complex machines that require the operator's constant attention to the outside world before innovating blindly. HOTAS (Hands on Throttle and Stick) as a concept has been adopted almost exclusively in fighter aircraft - and extended into Formula 1 and Indy cars as well - for this exact purpo…

I very much agree that dashboard design is generally awful. As controls have become more digital and less mechanical, they seem to have come to require more attention. For instance, one general pattern used to be if you wanted warm air you slid a horizontal lever more or less to the right or left. Once you got used to it, you could set it without looking, and with gloves on. Nowadays it's much more likely that you sp…

The indicator controls are a good example of this. They used to mechanically click into one of 3 positions, indicate left, off and indicate right. This made it very easy to switch them off. Now when you want to manually switch off the indicator it's very easy to to go too far and start indicating in the opposite direction. The only way to know what position they're in is then to look down at the lights on the dashboard. It's seems a huge step backwards in usability.

Re: Buttons that morph out of the surface of the device.

#70

Post by shahar2k »

the way I see it, physical buttons have two uses one is tactile navigation: the ability to find out what part of the screen you're touching and navigate it without vision.

the second use though is activation feedback, a button has to be able to be navigated separately from its activation. unless these protrusions can tell whether they are pressed or not, it still seems useless to have a lumpy touchscreen...

so I really hope they found some method of separating simply sliding a finger around searching for a button and realizing when the finger is pressing down... this is the exact same issue as the various touch-mice devices

(left click with finger on left side, right click with finger on right side, unless that is you like to REST your fingers while clicking)

Post reply on HN