Microsoft's Touchy-Feely TableIs surface computing the next big thing?

Remarks from the Fray:

No one has ever said they thought the keyboard and monitor was a great way to work with the computer.

20 years ago I was at conferences where impish GUI iconoclasts (pardon the expression) from PARC were advocating hyperbolic displays, motion sensing responsive screen surfaces, etc. The history of interface novelty at SIGGRAPH began with the first conference. MIT had 3-d surround, gesture sensing displays in the 80s.

Wired musicians like Tina Blaine http://www.jamodrum.net/ have built spatial interfaces to midi controllers that whole audiences could play with at once, like beach balls with pressure sensors that used rf connections to synths...churning out interactive music with unique and creative interfaces.

Nintendo commercialized a vr glove, for Engelbart's sake.

But none of the solutions have been, as they say, "sticky." Nothing comes close to the universality of the keyboard and the mouse.

And nothing will anytime soon.

The short reason is simply that every non-keyboard interface requires learning as much novel muscle/nerve coordination as it takes to learn to type. If you learn to type, you can type on a million keyboards. If you learn the multi touch interface of the apple iphone, however, you only can redial your grocery delivery service on your iphone. If you have to borrow a friends Blackberry, you are in an entirely different, multidimensional haptic universe. That requires typing.

Its one thing to create the intricate, robust and efficient mapping of intent to gesture to result that a satisfying interface design requires. Its another problem altogether to get the 100th monkey to learn it. Or even the second one.

Maybe Apple or Microsoft can impose a standard by brute force. Apple sort of succeeded in nudging Microsoft, and thence the globe, into the WIMP standard created at PARC in the 70s. But Microsoft intentionally scrambled some of Englebart, and Brenda Laurel's original brilliant clarity, for product differentiation. In so doing, they dumbed down the beauty of the original interface concept.

Making an interface intentionally inconsistent, as you can find in any version of Word, for example, is like introducing diseases into DNA. You can't replicate and generalize from success. Every encounter with a new task requires rote memory. These issues are simple, and at root, political, not technological.

Its like the 19th century Spanish generals who convinced the Parliament to require all railroads in Spain to run on a different guage track than the French, to make it harder to be invaded.

So, Surface makes great Utube video. A lot of other cool combinations of projection and touch sensitivity do too. But until Ebay puts out a Surface application that allows you to stack and sort your collector Barbies and Speak and Spells with haptic versimilitude, the Surface is just going to be one more fancy place to set your Metropolitan vodkatini while you size up the hot singles in the lobby.

--zeitguy

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My brother-in-law is so interested in this kind of technology, he has become a low-level evangelist for it, showing captive audiences the Jeff Han video and the like. But what stake does someone like him really have in this kind of interface? He's not a graphic designer or someone who works in the visual arts. Why are we suddenly so anxious to get away from our keyboards?

I understand Steve Jobs' point of view that the keyboard we have hooked up to our devices is a one-size-fits-all peripheral. As a result, the keyboard does have a number of limitations. It can't highlight and/or enlarge the important keys used by particular applications and it can't disappear when you don't need your keyboard but do need extra space.

But it seems like I would really miss what we would lose if we were to ditch our keyboards, what with their whole location in space and time "feature." For one, there's a continuity to using a single keyboard to do all the work a computer or a device does. But even more than that, I feel like we would become just slightly more passive if robbed of our QWERTYs: we would be selecting icons, pointing to items in pull-down menus, etc., instead of typing what we want into the system. With my keyboard I can be creative. With my mouse, I can only grab the cheese they place in front of me.

--armchairperson

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