Off Course-On Target

The Fourth Screen and Counting

I don’t get to see much TV in this new grand adventure I’m on, not that I ever seemed to have time to watch much before either, so many of you may have seen this before but it was new to me. 

Here is great example of why I’ve often suggested that new perspectives are so powerful and valuable and I try to find and create as many as I can.  Oh, and yes this is an advertisement; get over it!  Great content often comes from the most unlikely sources.  This one comes from Nokia.

As you’ll see when you watch the video, they present a fascinating and I think very useful way of seeing the evolution of “screens” and media as moving from:

1. Movie theatre screens
2. Television screens
3. Computer screens
4. mobile/smart phone screens

It’s been rather amazing for me to watch how the screen has quietly embedded itself into our understanding of what a “phone” is. Not so many years ago the word phone would have been would have been thought to mean a device for talking only.  The notion of “watching a phone” would have sounded ridiculous and still sounds rather funny when you say it like that.

By Any Name; Handy is the Game

They now go by many other names such as mobile, cell, smartphone, PDA, and yes even the iPhone of late.  There is even this long list of “Mobile phone terms across the world”.  But I think I like the one common in many European countries the best where they are often called a “handy”

Handy (plural form Handys), pronounced /hɛndi/, a pseudo-anglicism that is used in Austria and Germany for a mobile phone (rare alternative spelling: Händi). In German, the word "Handy" has the meaning of "Hand-Telefon" or "handgehaltenes Mobiltelefon" (translated to English: "handheld mobile telephone"). The term possibly derived from the 1940s product name Handie-Talkie for a handheld military radio. (The backpack version was introduced as Walkie-Talkie.)               - entry from Wikipedia

Whatever the origin or spelling “handy” is certainly an accurate description of these amazing devices we used to call phones and only use to talk on.  And it is this dramatic increase in utility that I think is the really important part of the transformation of these “screens” have brought to our world.

Mashing, Melting and Morphing

More than just the addition of a screen these devices are the mashup or melting pot of a lot of different devices and capabilities from many different directions and original purposes including digital cameras, MP3 or music players, TV and video players, and PCs.  This is what I thought was most clever and useful about the way the Nokia Fourth Screen video presented the evolutionary stages, as you can see how each successive screen swallows the one before it.

* Please also note that none of these stages has eliminated the one before it and  ALL remain valuable and in great use!  As I’ve often pointed out our history is one where technology never really dies and while disruptive, the next new stage does not eliminate the one before it.

While the addition of a screen that is capable of displaying most any kind of content is important, so much more so than the screen it has been the freedom that comes from mobility that has been the game changer.  In fact the screen, while necessary is most often quite inferior to the ones that came before.  A reverse trend if you notice going through the four screens is that each one has been smaller and arguably inferior in visual quality to the one that came before!   However in each case of the steps along the way we gained more freedom, choice and opportunity of both what we could have on the screen, where we could have the screen and our control over the interactions with with other people and their screens.

These new phones have also brought us the closest thing to wireless, untethered and unfettered we’ve ever been.  WiFi can be useful when used with things like desktop PCs and laptops for other reasons, but it only really delivers on its true value IMHO when it enables you to be completely free to have what you want whenever and wherever you are.  Even with the shrinking size of laptops and the new “netbooks” they are still large enough and cumbersome enough that you often don’t have them in your hands at your fingertips when you need them.  The “4th screen”, with it’s ability to slip into your pocket or clip onto your belt or just stay in your hand, is the most likely to be there whenever you need it and brings us closest yet of truly having the world at our fingertips anytime, anywhere.

Evolving the Screen to Death

And will there be fifth screen?  I think so and more after that.  What I’d see coming next is the further shrinking and transparency of the overall physical devices and the elimination of the fixed nature of the screens and input devices.  In the case of the screens what I mean is when there is no limit to the size of the screen and you can view, and you can have whatever size makes sense for the situation you are in.  Sometimes all I need is a screen big enough to tell me the time, temperature, a phone number or a factual answer to a question.  Some times black and white is fine too.  But other times I want screens the size of whole walls or the size of buildings, with very high definition sound and visual fidelity.  And I want them to be there when I need them.  So for example in a previous post on Coming to our Senses: Touch we saw some advances heading toward having screens that can be stretched to any size you’d like, so you could have one rolled up in your pocket or purse and whenever you needed a screen you could simply stretch it out to whatever size you’d like from postage stamp to a wall.  Or perhaps we’ll see mainstream versions of “virtual screens” that might fit on the rim of your glasses or slip over your ear and let you see any size screen in front of you that you’d like. 

After that, the Sixth Screen perhaps?  By this stage I think there will be no screen at all!  Again in my posting Coming to our Senses: Touch in the section on “Digital Clay” I laid out the coming of fully 3D images that might be along the lines of holograms for example and which would also include haptic bi-directional feedback so I can both feel what I see and shape or change it with my hands. 

WYSIWYG superceded by WYNIWYG

The trick however to having all this amazing advances in “screens” is not so much in the screens themselves but in the freedom to see who and what I need whenever and wherever I want to.  This is all part of the trend I’ve been calling the Snowflake Effect or getting it “just right” and what I believe Gartner first started calling WYNIWYG: What You Need Is What You Get.

“Context driven networks will connect us in new and more meaningful ways than the bandwidth-focused networks of today. The idea is no longer WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get), but now we look for WYNIWYG (What You NEED Is What You Get)! Networks will be able to anticipate your needs and make information available to you when you need it.”   
 - Gartner Emerging Trends 2008

For me, the destination of this evolution of the screen is when it disappears completely leaving me free to see (hear, touch and even smell) just what, who, when and where I want.  I don’t know or care if this will be the 5th, 6th or 21st “screen” but it will be just right 4me and it will be here much sooner than most people suspect.

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”.