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US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls on its destroyers

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Re: US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls on its destroyers

#311

Post by gugagore »

bigiain wrote: post #279
Justsignedup wrote: post #198

Wait. Let me get this straight. Touchscreens, which are ideal for representing multiple user unterfaces in an intuitive way, but requiring constant visual contact are being replaced by a physical user interface that can be used by both touch, and memory? Why was touchscreen ever even a consideration for controls you're not looking at? Touchscreen is great for phones. It is awful for keyboards (see macbook pro). And i…

> Has nobody researched this before spending a few hundred million dollars? Of _course_ they did. But nobody listens to the UX/HCI researchers and academics, when the touchscreen vendor's sales team are inviting them to fully catered lunches on a tropical golf course... Business as usual.

Do you know that this has happened specifically around touchscreens, or is this a more general observation?

Re: US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls on its destroyers

#312

Post by jakear »

p2t2p wrote: post #271
tfha wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The emergency brake. I really need that to be a mechanical lever and not an electrical one. If something is going wrong on the road I need a backup brake that takes me under a second to activate while in a state of panic with my eyes glued to the road and it had better be functional.

That’s the worst thing you could do. You block your wheels and you totally loose control over the vehicle. ABS enabled bakes do stop you quicker while maintaining control over the vehicle.

ABS is not much help when your breaks fail. I think that's what GP was referring to.

Re: US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls on its destroyers

#313

Post by freerobby »

pandapower2 wrote: post #300
almog wrote: post #226

"Fun" touchscreen story - I had to file a warranty claim for my not so cheap blender that had mechanical controls. The company replaced it with the newer model, that had, you guessed it - touchscreen control. Not long after that, I was working in the kitchen, moving stuff into the blender, when a drop of water made it to the screen. The thing started at full speed throwing liquid everywhere, which worsened the situat…

>If I had to guess the next touchscreen everywhere will be misuse of AI, not in a malicious way, but in a really stupid one. Reminds me of a talk someone gave. I forget who. Elon Musk perhaps. A quick google didn't turn it up. Anyhow, they laid out a hypothetical scenario where humans were driven to extinction by a run away AI. Rather than being some sort of Skynet scenario where the machines are explicitly trying to…

That talk is a spin on Nick Bostrom's Paperclip Maximizer. See: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer

Re: US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls on its destroyers

#314

Post by yyx »

pandapower2 wrote: post #300
almog wrote: post #226

"Fun" touchscreen story - I had to file a warranty claim for my not so cheap blender that had mechanical controls. The company replaced it with the newer model, that had, you guessed it - touchscreen control. Not long after that, I was working in the kitchen, moving stuff into the blender, when a drop of water made it to the screen. The thing started at full speed throwing liquid everywhere, which worsened the situat…

>If I had to guess the next touchscreen everywhere will be misuse of AI, not in a malicious way, but in a really stupid one. Reminds me of a talk someone gave. I forget who. Elon Musk perhaps. A quick google didn't turn it up. Anyhow, they laid out a hypothetical scenario where humans were driven to extinction by a run away AI. Rather than being some sort of Skynet scenario where the machines are explicitly trying to…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paper...

Re: US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls on its destroyers

#315

Post by gugagore »

lb1lf wrote: post #193
bmurphy1976 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't cars have 2 batteries? One for starting the car, and the other for all the crap that tends to kill the battery when you most need it? Probably because it costs more money and nobody will pay for it. That's the best guess I have.

You just have to be picky when you choose cars; my twenty year old Land Cruiser came with twin batteries factory fitted - though rather than one for starting and one for all the thingamajigs, they went with two beefy ones in parallel - 2*105Ah makes sure it starts every time. I have been contemplating using the second one as an auxiliary battery after installing a fridge in the boot, though. Basically a matter of fit…

Two beefy ones in parallel don't really solve the problem. If you leave your 1-Amp (probably a gross underapproximation) headlights on over the course of ~200 hours, you'll deplete the battery.

Re: US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls on its destroyers

#316

Post by namibj »

gugagore wrote: post #309
ethbro wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an interesting thought. You'd want to use a full bandwidth data channel (e.g. Bluetooth) for anything complicated. But for simple things, if possible without affecting the other parts of the screen, it'd be amazing to have a broadly supported, low bandwidth standard.

I can't really make sense of the bandwidth (information rate) of a tactile interface. A measure in units of length would make more sense to me.

It's enough for knobs of 1 inch spacing or wider, no easy support for fancy geared knobs that coaxially have a rough setting and a fine adjustment.

Re: US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls on its destroyers

#317

Post by chrismorgan »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #241
MisterTea wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it worked on Star Trek. Then again, that was addressed in a Voyager episode when Tom Paris designs the helm in their new runabout with old fashioned buttons and switches because he wanted to actually feel the controls much to Tuvok's dismay. Though, on a serious note, I work in industrial automation and user interfaces, aka HMI's have been touch oriented for quite some time. It was and still is common to see gr…

I installed encoder knobs to emulate potentiometers There's really no need to force this decision to go in either direction. Ever since I first heard of capacitive multitouch, going back to the timeframe before the first iPhone announcement, I've been waiting for someone to build 'stick-on' encoder knobs that the touchscreen controller can read. These would simply take the form of a knob with a metal leaf or other po…

Very strongly related to what you describe is fiducial markers. They were a big thing in the small pond that was projected touch surfaces some years ago, though I haven’t heard anything much about it in recent years as the industry has headed in a different direction. It’s harder to find info on them now, but it’s still out there. A quick search yielded https://www.christianholz.net/fiberio.html which contains an image of the concept at the bottom.

Re: US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls on its destroyers

#318

Post by dredmorbius »

megaremote wrote: post #288
lucb1e wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh boy, driving through the shit town of Haaren by bus while trying to text my girlfriend I'll be there in 10. I miss my Nokia 6230i or E75 so much during those times. I don't get why nobody made an E75-style phone with Android, I look for it every time I need a new phone but there is never anything reasonable.

They do make them. People keep pretending they don't exist without even looking for them.

Examples?

Re: US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls on its destroyers

#319

Post by thanatos_dem »

Somewhat related - when I was working at Union Pacific in 2011, there was a hugely expensive effort to replace the old 1024x768 monitors in the locomotives with 1080p equivalents, including redesigning a lot of the UIs to work in a wide screen form factor.

After the rollout completed, all the feedback was negative, saying that the fonts were too small to read on the new displays, especially when the locomotive began vibrating at speed.

In the end, the whole fleet had a software update pushed out that set the resolution back to 1024x760, and all the UIs looked stretched. The engineers (train, not software) were ecstatic.

Lesson to take away is that with user interaction, it’s important to look at how humans will actually be using the system. That seems self evident, but given stories like these clearly isn’t.

Re: US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls on its destroyers

#320

Post by macintux »

mLuby wrote: post #297
o-__-o wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the Airbus v Boeing problem. There are two schools of thought, one being that you the operator can control all the settings including the ones necessary to avoid the fogging. There are others that do so automatically. So many times people would be aggravated that my a/c would turn on with the heat in my Audi. What they didn’t realize was how that prevented fogging of the windows which inevitably would happen…

Automatic things are annoying IF the user isn't sure what is happening or why. Heat randomly turns on -> human is confused, maybe uncomfortable, and might think the car is broken/haunted. Heat randomly turns on, car displays "Preventing windshield fogging" -> human is thankful car is thinking ahead.

Except that displaying unexpected content interrupts the driver’s attention and takes it way from where it needs to be.

It’s certainly not important enough to distract someone performing any delicate maneuver.

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