Off Course-On Target

Coming to Our Senses: Touch

As I sit here typing on my keyboard and clicking my mouse, I find myself desperately hoping we may finally be moving beyond our narrow view of what form interfaces between humans and technology can take to one where we can be more creative and innovative...and effective!

Seems to me that today, almost every interface is limited to no more than a variation on more button pushing!  Computers, for example, come with keyboards and mice, and we even carry this metaphor of button-pushing onto the screen with “virtual buttons” that we have to "push".  And  even smaller devices, such as mobile phones, are designed with button-driven interfaces.

Recently we’ve transferred button-pushing over to “touch” screens on phones and we think that this is just "oh so cool' and innovative.  Give me a break!  Most examples don’t even work as well as a real button!  Ever tried to type more than a word or two on a touch screen keyboard?

Enough with the buttons already!!

There is a glimmer of hope, however, in the world of interfaces!  Some of the new phones from Samsung (currently only available in China) use Immersion’s VibeTonz technology, a tactile feedback that simulates the feeling of pushing a mechanical button even though the surface is completely flat and does not move. It is the latest example of a new breed of haptic technologies that do for the sense of touch what high definition displays and surround sound do for eyes and ears. (see links at end for more on haptic technologies)

But I believe that the lack of feedback in touch screen devices will severely limit their success and adoption, and that someday we will shake our heads when we remember how we lived “out of touch” for so long without the use of touch in interfaces.

Hope on the Horizon?

But surely we can be more creative and innovative with our interactions and interfaces than limiting every solution to simply a variation on more button pushing!  Currently we are seeing innovative uses of touch screens that provide a better interface and interaction with our digital world. Applications on the iPhone and other smartphones, for example, let you flick or flip things around, such as a set of digital photos or stacks of music CD artwork. This use of “gestures” as a way of interacting has great promise and recent examples, such as the Wii controller and some of the multi-person, multi-touch interfaces on digital surfaces are showing great promise. 

Since touch works in both directions—as feedback to us and feedback from us—I'm delighted to see the use of haptic interfaces with the Wii controller, which generates physical feedback to your hands as you strike a tennis ball or golf ball, for example, and simultaneously uses your physical input to provide velocity and angle as you swing a golf club and the resultant force applied to the ball. Airplane and car simulation game controllers (joy sticks, steering wheel, brake & gas pedals) also provide similar haptic feedback. Flight simulators for training pilots and amusement park “virtual reality rides” show us how truly real, natural, and effective touch interfaces can be.

Let’s Stop Flapping and Start Flying!

But these incremental improvements, like touch screen buttons and limited haptic feedback, also serve to continue our "flapping" behavior of mimicking physical button pushing.  Our tendency to focus on copying what worked well in the past, such as designing planes that mimic flapping wings on birds or pushing buttons for machines, is in fact holding us back from truly "flying"!  If you are not familiar with my use of this metaphor of "flapping vs. flying", take a few minutes to read or listen to my story on “Confusing Flapping with Flying”. 

To start truly "flying", that is developing truly innovative solutions, I think we need to focus on the use of touch and tactile feedback as some of the essential elements of successful interactions and interfaces.  For example, the ability for us to feel and touch any object even though it is not “really there” and similarly for our technology to acquire the sense of feel and touch.

Less Virtual, More Real

Early applications of virtual reality used to seem pretty cool but now they seem, as my daughter liked to say to me, “Oh so yesterday, Dad!”.  These early efforts failed because they were too virtual and too far from reality. Today, we can see clearly how much of a difference it makes when, for example, motion, sound ,and color is added to movies. More recently ,the addition of some 3D, high definition, and high fidelity has narrowed this "reality gap" to our eyes and ears. And virtual reality applications required all that extraneous equipment, such as headsets, goggles, helmets, gloves and even full body suits, to provide the feedback to or from us, which severely separate or distanced us from the reality of the situation.

So, what if we moved towards being more real and more natural?  What if we had digital models with haptic interfaces that let us feel, handle, turn, assemble and disassemble them? How about applying full haptic feedback to a holographic images? Imagine if holographs provided not just stunning visual 3D reality, but also came with haptic feedback to your hands, so that you could feel their edges, curves, and shapes?

Digital Clay:  Digital Prototyping gets Real

Moving along the reality scale, we already have very functional and bidirectional digital prototyping via 3D scanners and 3D printers.  Together these can both create digital models from existing objects (input) as well create new fully-functional physical objects (output). Such digital prototyping can all be done BEFORE we start using large amounts of materials and energy to produce the “real things” ** and before we use the energy and resources to create these physical entities. This capability may well turn out to be one of the single greatest ways of conserving resources and energy and bringing some much needed practical reality to the “green” movement.

Leaping (and lurching) further forward, wouldn’t it be great have true virtual digital prototyping that gave us an experience equal to that of having the real thing in our hands?  How about if we could move beyond digital clay to “real clay” where haptic sensors and generators were built-in at the nano level or could be more like the holographic + haptic models I mentioned previously.  With this digital clay in your hands, you could now create any shapes and objects you like "by hand" or you could add some "clay" to your 3D printed models or you could use 3D printing to create a whole model out of digital clay and use this as the starting point of your design work or testing.

AND, now how about if we also hook up some of that digital clay “backwards”, so that rather than limiting the feedback to one direction—from our hands to the clay— it could also move from the clay to our hands?!

Say what, Wayne?

Well, imagine you are on a team whose members reside in many different locations. Your team is designing some physical object, such as a new smart phone. Rather than “just” having a 3D printer create the latest design iteration of the phone on your desk as a “solid”, what if every team member had one made out of digital clay and whenever you changed the phone's shape or moved some buttons, for example, the other phones at the other locations changed accordingly. You each would have a working version.

THAT sounds a lot more real and a lot less virtual to me, and it's all possible by adding the use of our sense of touch to our interactions with technology.

** BTW, this example starts to show how increasingly strained the concept of “real” is becoming and what I see as another trend towards the closing and ultimate elimination of the “reality gap”.  But I’ll expand more upon this in a future posting.

eSkin

The integration of sensory feedback and control within technology provides another look at touch working in reverse (so to speak), and it is equally important and fascinating.  One recent example is the progress being made with “e-Skin” for robots. This new material  is the first that combines two key characteristics:

• The ability to stretch like rubber
• The ability to conduct electricity like metal into a single substance

They’ve accomplished this with carbon nanotubes and used it to allow robots or machines to “feel” heat, pressure, and texture. I was equally intrigued with e-skin's potential to to stretch into larger sizes and onto curved non-flat shapes. I can imagine how this could lead to having displays in your pocket that you can pull out, unroll, and stretch into a large scale screen for viewing, or applications as "skin" grafts for burn victims.

Hiding Everything but the Benefits

Some have suggested that Jules Verne completely missed the computer and all its technology in his futuristic books such as 2000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Around the World in Eighty Days. But I think Verne got it completely right by NOT focusing on or imagining computers and technology. He simply assumed that the compute power was just “there” behind the scenes. I loved the way he kept the focus on the fantastic capabilities and the grand adventures we would have if such capabilities existed.  Who cares how or what enables them?

So it is my belief and my hope that we are finally seeing technology dissolve into the background and into ourselves so that the focus can be on people, challenges, solutions, and great adventures in life. I know I'm signed up for the pursuit of joy and as such I welcome and champion any and all movement towards more natural interfaces and the use of all of our human senses to communicate and work more effectively with each other and with our supporting cast of machines and technology.

BTW, here are links to some good animation on haptic interfaces/technology from Grabriel Robes-De-la-Torre and a full paper on “Haptic interfaces and Devices”.

Lurching Towards More Natural Interfaces

In “Coming to our Senses?”  I introduced the topic of finding ways to make better use of our human senses to interact and interface with tools, technology, and machines, and even between ourselves. The LiveScribe Pulse digital pen and paper provides a good example of more “natural” and sense-based ways of interacting, communicating, and connecting.

For more of an overview of this new product, read my article  “LiveScribe Pulse Digital Pen + Paper”. This relatively new addition to digital pen and paper offers exciting capabilities, such as the ability to create sketches and drawings and embed audio explanations or sounds within them, or the ability to write in one language and have the words spoken through the speakers in another language.  Its combination of sight, sound, sketching, and writing reminds me that we are making progress, however slow and lurching, towards more natural interfaces and interactions and in particular, those which are and sensory or sense-based.  In addition, the Pulse pen lets you create some fascinating new "mashups" by mixing and matching written words with sketches, and drawings with speech and sounds.

Deafening Silence Coming to an End?

When you stop and think about it, isn’t it rather odd that we have been working this long with computers and other forms of capturing our thoughts and ideas without much effective use of sounds and speech?  We have the ability to capture audio so clearly and so easily, and yet we are only just now seeing an expansion of its application through podcasts, text to speech, speech to text, and voice recognition.  I suspect we will look back in a few years and view this time as akin to the days when movies were silent or before before audio recording and playback were possible.  Our children will surely ask how we could have ever put up with “silent” notes, sketches and drawings and to have managed to live without the ability to just create whatever interfaces and interactions we wanted on the fly.

In light of this, I’m hoping this article and others to follow, will make you aware of and encourage you to try for yourself, some of the additional new capabilities this digital pen puts into our hands.

Draw Your Own Interface

One of the best new features recently introduced by digital pens such as the Pulse and the Fly Pen is the ability to “draw your own interface”.

I’m fascinated by this overall capability for combining writing, drawing and programming. The Pulse pen lets you create your own interfaces anywhere you want (on digital paper) by just drawing them. For example, you can draw a cross symbol, which the Pulse pen understands for navigation of the pens various features.  You can then use this simple graphic interface to scroll through the programs on the pen, playback, and recording of audio, etc.

Programs can also be developed for the Pulse pen that enable the creation of any kind of interaction between the “ink” and sounds.  For example, a demo has you create a piano by drawing an eight note keyboard, which you can then “play” by touching the pen on the virtual key on the paper and hearing whichever note you touch through the speaker in the pen or via headphones that you can plug into the end of the pen. 

Another powerful capability lets you to write in one language and convert it to spoken words in another.

These examples of "draw your own interface" are limited and minor at this point to be sure, but just start to imagine what this opens up as we begin to draw our own interfaces.  And not just for literal human-computer interfaces but the ability to make anything we draw come to life, draw and play our own instruments, draw and listen to our own stories, etc.  Try out some of these new capabilities yourself.

My Very Own Purple Crayon at Last?!

These capabilities are about the closest thing yet to making one of my all-time favorite children’s stories, Harold and the Purple Crayon become a reality!  If you don’t know this 50-year-old classic by Crockett Johnson, then you should.  It is an absolute "must read "in my book.

In the story, whatever Harold draws with his purple crayon becomes real.  He wants to go for a walk so he draws himself a sidewalk.  He’s hungry, so he draws an apple tree and then adds a ferocious dragon to protect it for him. So scary is the dragon that Harold’s hands start shaking, causing the crayon to create water and waves, so Harold needs to draw a sailboat to climb into...and you get the idea. 

I encourage you to stop right now, and imagine you have this ability to have whatever you draw come to life and interact with you. What do you come up with for some other practical uses?  What does your wild imagination conjure up?   I suspect that you will soon have a list of amazing and truly exciting possibilities, and I hope you will take a few minutes to post them to your own site or share them here.

Natural Interfaces at Last?

These recent advances with digital pen, paper, and sound provide yet another significant marker on our journey towards truly “natural” and sense- based interfaces. I believe that there are some characteristics that are essential and relatively timeless when it comes to anything we humans are going to use effectively to communicate, live, learn, and work together.  Sketching and drawing will continue to be some of the primary means we use to communicate and will be highly effective ways of capturing, sharing, and explaining our thoughts and ideas. What could be more “natural” to us as humans than drawing, writing, and talking?  So too will the spoken and written word, acting, gesturing, storytelling, feeling and forming things with our hands,  and so on. 

Anything and everything that can be done to capitalize and leverage our very human senses and natural ways of interacting, communicating and connecting will be a move in the right direction. Stay tuned for many more postings I’ll be doing on this overall topic and trend towards more natural sense-based interfaces.

Coming to our Senses

If you have been kind enough to listen to me or read some of my entries on OCOT or my other writings, you may have correctly concluded that I suffer from a severe case of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). Contrary to popular opinion (and even some “experts”), ADD is not about a LACK of “attention” but rather, an excess of it! 

And Now a Word from My Symptom

Those of us with ADD are unable to pay attention to just ONE thing at a time and are instead forced to pay attention to every sensory input all of the time. We try to make sense of things when EVERY thing is demanding our focus. All of our sensory inputs are dealt with equally and simultaneously. 

What we can’t do, for example, is turn down the volume on every sound except the one we want to focus on. We can't tune out the movements we see around us or choose not feel every input through our skin. In other words, we can only pay attention to EVERYTHING, all at the same time and all at equal levels.

I’m one of the fortunate few with ADD who, long before I knew what it even was, began to develop  coping skills and techniques to survive with these traits. They didn’t seem like anything special to me.  For the longest time, I just assumed everyone else was having the same experience.  And somehow I managed to start turning these “bugs” into features that have enabled me to be as successful as I am and to do what I do. If everything demands your attention and you find everything interesting, then life is very full!

If you are interested in learning more about ADD, look at some of these  alternative descriptions.  And on the topic of attention itself, I know of no better source than that of my dear friend and fellow ADDer Marcia Conner and her Ageless Learner site’s section on Attention and on How Adults Learn.

But now, back to the topic at hand (see what I mean?!)

It All ADDs Up

So why are my ADD tendencies relevant here?  Because its a way to introduce a meta theme that I'd like to address on OCOT. Just as my own natural sensory interface presents challenges, so too are the challenges of developing human/machine sense-based interfaces. Over a series of postings, I'd like to address:

• The use of our human senses as ways through which we communicate and interact with machines, computers, and technology, and ourselves. 
• Other interrelated topics both individually and as a collective whole. 

I’ll do my best to stay "on target" as I wander around "off course" and divide my pursuit of this trend toward more natural and sense-based interfaces into several separate posts. I see it playing a critical role in the future I am both designing and imagining.  

The Missing Link?

Interestingly, this whole topic of natural or sense-based interfaces does not seem to have any common singular term or definition. Or perhaps I just have not found it and some of you can point me to it?  I’m aware of categories such as:

• HCI  Human Computer Interaction/interface
• HMI Human Machine Interface/interaction
• User Interface

But these all seem to be differentiated based on interactions with specific types of technology, computers only, or segmented into individual human senses, such as touch with the use of haptic interfaces and technology with tactile feedback . And I can find definitions of HCI, HMI such as this one from Wikipedia that describe them as:

“...the 'layer' that separates a human that is operating a machine from the machine itself.”

However, my interest is in the larger meta theme of using all human senses and eliminating the “separation layer” between machines and ourselves so that they are invisible and we can directly connect and communicate through our senses. I’m want to ensure that we are taking the more holistic and inclusive view of the use of ALL of our senses, not only because we have so many that are being underused, but also because it is often the combination of multiple senses that make up our best experiences and interactions.

Making Sense of and Better Use of Our Senses

So here’s what I’m going to do. I’ll address the meta theme of sense-based and more natural interfaces through a variety of posts, podcasts, and perhaps some interviews over the next few months. I’ll alternate between the big picture view of the use of senses in general and the use of them collectively, then look at the use of individual senses such as touch and feel, audio, visual, and so on. I will also cover the use of combinations of senses for better, more innovative designs and solutions for interacting with technology...and each other. Add to this the coverage of tools, technology, and examples of real world applications of sensory-based and natural interfaces and I think we’ll have a lot of fun and learn a lot in the process. These posts will be intermixed with other topics on a regular basis and spread over many months for as long as my and your interest continues to be high.

Oh!  Look at that cool blue butterfly that just flew by!  Hmm, I wonder what kind of plane that is flying overhead?  Now what was I saying?  Oh yeah, senses, interfaces, human interaction... 

Hang on, fasten your seatbelts low and tight, we’re about to take off on what should prove to be a fun and very "off course", very "on target" sensory journey!