Lenny
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Touch screens are great, but… Very much but, in my line of work. I really do like to have a physical knob selected to turn a control; doing it with the screen itself is not natural yet.
Touch screens are great, but I agree completely that they should not even be considered for some systems.
For example, two uses that really annoyed me in the new The Amazing Spider-Man film:
The top one shows a touchscreen security lock, and the second shows a touchscreen fire alarm... there is no need to replace stable, mechanical systems with something that can be hacked or easily broken.
My biggest problem with touchscreens in systems is the prevalence of skeuomorphism and realism in the interface design - why should my digital calendar only show a single month and force me to swipe it away to be shown a completely separate month? Why should my digital book look like a real book, showing only two pages and giving me a tacky page-turning animation? Why should sound-mixing apps for those idiot hipster DJs who think they're all that look exactly like a mixing desk, down to textured sliders and knobs that act the way real knobs and sliders do? We have this fantastic technology that allows us interaction without the limitations you come to expect from physical and mechanical objects, and then some idiot designer goes and sticks an interface on it that looks and acts exactly like its real world counterpart.
Digital interfaces allow you to do things that just aren't possible with physical objects - let me drill right down into the minutes in an hour on my calendar app, and compare days and weeks over multiple months; let me view my book as one continuous scrolling page, or change the zoom, or give me controls to allow me to jump to anywhere (how about a search function that shows a nice list of all occurrences of a character, for example?).
Ironically, the company to blame for this trend is Apple. Despite being lauded as the greatest design company in the world, iOS looks disgusting, with fake leather and shining wooden bookcases everywhere.
If anyone is at all interested in designing interfaces properly, this article is a good starting point: http://sachagreif.com/flat-pixels/
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Eye-tracking, and controlling interfaces with the eye, is another fascinating subject.
From a technical standpoint, it is an incredibly hard problem, because the eye naturally jumps around without conscious direction from the, er, 'owner'. The key to building working systems controlled by eye movement is being able to determine when the eye movement is purposeful (obviously...).
I can remember reading a fair few research articles on the subject when Google Glass was first announced - I'm short on time at the moment, so I'll hunt them down at a later point, but the general solution, if I remember correctly, is to observe the movement of muscles around the eye, as purposeful movements (e.g. when the optician tells you to look left, right, up, down) trigger muscle movement that doesn't occur when the eye is naturally flitting around.