Better than Touch

We love our touch based devices, from the iPad to the smartphone to the Kindle. But are there better interfaces than touch that could be created?

Bret Victor certainly thinks so. He points out that almost every real world object offers some feedback to our hands (“texture, pliability, temperature; their distribution of weight; their edges, curves, and ridges; and how they respond in your hand as you use them.”). Now contrast that with what you feel when you interact via touchscreens (“Did it feel glassy? Did it have no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing?”). That is why Victor terms current touch tech as “Pictures Under Glass”:

“It's obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better.”

So what is the future then? As per Victor:

“Despite how it appears to the culture at large, technology doesn't just happen. Revolutionary technology comes out of long research, and research is performed and funded by inspired people…And this is my plea — be inspired by the untapped potential of human capabilities. Don't just extrapolate yesterday's technology and then cram people into it.”

That brings me to Christian Brown’s point that Hollywood influences people’s idea of what the future might be like. Check out the Tom Cruise movie, Minority Report, and what would you be inspired to build?

“A virtual iPad interface, hovering in front of the actor using it.”

Brown also points out that some of the gesture controls from the movie are very mainstream today:

“The pinch-zoom, the rotation, and the swipe-to-dismiss are all used daily by smartphone users.”

Newer forms of interaction could even be predictive/invisible (interfaces that do/show what you want without your even asking them to. This is something Google already does, as I described in an earlier blog). But the problem with such interfaces, says Brown, is that “these ideas are elegant, understated, and impossible to understand when shown on camera.” In other words, such interfaces are not cinemagenic. And that is why, Brown laments:

“Touch-screen interfaces, which look great because of how easy it is to tell what a user is doing on camera, have managed to take over our lives.”

And as long as Hollywood is influential, Brown is worried that:

“Like porn, techno interfaces are more focused on what looks good than what feels good.”

Nonetheless, here’s hoping that Brown and Victor’s preference trumps Hollywood!