First-generation interpretation of a multi-touch interface

Multi-touch human interfaces have arrived, but so far they are like surprise visitors: we may be happy to see them, but we’re not ready to let them move-in for good. For those of us who are engineers and work every day to realize the dreams of future products, multi-touch offers an opportunity to change the world, in much the same way the first graphical user interfaces did. The race has just begun, but make no mistake, it will be won soon. Personally, I’m not convinced we have a winner yet, and if we don’t step up to make multi-touch a great technology, we will live with it being marginal for a long time.

What is multi-touch?

The world applauded Apple’s first-generation interpretation of a multi-touch interface in the iPhone 1.0. The new user interface worked, it offered appropriate functionality, and they didn’t forget to make phone-calling easy. Apple iPhone added gestures to our vocabulary, offering two-finger pinch to zoom-in, two-finger open to zoom-out, and two-finger rotate; all intuitive and useful on a device with a camera and small screen.

Not many people realize that Apple began their foray into multi-touch with the two-finger touchpad sensing implemented in their large touchpad notebooks that was utilized by the operating system and every application. Even before the iPhone, an Apple notebook user could scroll, both vertical and horizontal, using two fingers on the touchpad. Apple even made their stubborn single-button-touchpad choice look prescient by enabling right-mouse button functionality by putting two fingers on the touchpad and clicking the button (eliminating the annoying <CTRL>-click). Again, it’s hard to call these choices anything but useful and welcome. Just recently, multi-touch offerings or announcements from many different vendors highlight the “final-frontier” opportunity today for multi-touch user interface technology. Apple introduced their next-generation MacBooks on October 9, 2008 showing the familiar two-finger gestures of iPhone with new – and less intuitive – three- and four-finger gestures. Microsoft began shipping its multi-touch brain-child called Surface that comes with a hefty $5,000 to $15,000 price tag making it clearly aimed at money-making businesses (early adopters are AT&T and Harrah’s Entertainment). At the October 2008 Microsoft Professional Developer’s conference, Microsoft unveiled its upcoming Windows 7 and promised multi-touch support. The Microsoft idea of multi-touch as shown with Surface provides some gestures, like the 2-finger gestures to zoom and rotate, but seems more targeted at a multi-user experience. So the question remains, what is multi-touch? The impact of multi-touch will be as far-reaching as the computer mouse and the engineering community needs to step in to ensure that multi-touch fares better in the future than the graphics pad (remember the digitizing, pen-like computer input device that none of us has on our notebooks?)

Multi-touch technology today

In contrast, single-touch interfaces are most often based on the old “touchscreen” technologies most of us experienced on our cell phones and PDAs were resistive, where the stylus position yielded two voltages, one representing the “X-axis” position and the other representing the “Y-axis”. Single-touch interfaces result in the same X-Y data that a traditional track-pad and mouse provides today. For their multi-touch interfaces, Apple uses capacitive sensing and Microsoft Surface uses cameras. Capacitive sensing is also the technology typically used in single-touch trackpads in notebook computers. There are several module, screen and individual silicon vendors supporting multi-touch, so there are many options available on the market, making selection a potentially confusing process. Depending upon the technology, it is possible to simultaneously sense the position of all 10 fingers on a display (see the video here)Certainly the capability to support multi-touch interfaces in a myriad of ways is available. The rub is that there is no one standard way to use this multi-touch data in a computer application.

To see where multi-touch can go, let’s return to how the two easiest-to-review implementations of multi-touch interpret what the users of the future (that’s you and me) need. The Apple iPhone implements what is referred to as “Multi-Touch Gestures” where two fingers are sensed and their relative motions translated into a gesture that a program can react to (i.e., rotate, zoom, select and move). At a minimum, these gestures need to appear quickly in the lexicon of every laptop, but that means every program and operating systems needs to change to accommodate them. Beyond the 2-finger gestures, the picture blurs quickly. “Multi-Touch All Point” technology enables many simultaneous inputs from the touchscreen or touchpad. What to do with these inputs, now, is the question. There are huge opportunities here, but the current examples of Apple and Microsoft are not exploiting them to the fullest.

Apple has included three- and four-finger gestures on the new MacBook, but only Apple applications use these gestures (unlike the scrolling and left clicking two-finger gestures). Additionally, the thought process behind which functions should take three fingers and which four fingers appears to be somewhat arbitrary. What doesn’t make sense is the comeback of the <CTRL> button, being used as a modifier to the three-finger gestures, even though the touchpad is large and has the ability to sense lots of fingers. Also, the multi-touch equivalent of the mouse-click+<SHIFT> -drag to select seems to have disappeared. Anyone else have trouble completely adopting a Palm(TM) PDA because Grafitti(TM) never became second nature?

Intuitive gestures equal easy adoption

Likewise, Microsoft with Surface(TM) seems to be stumbling in the dark when it comes to using more than two-fingers. For instance, they have a virtual air-hockey game demo that uses one finger for each player to grab and move the controller (there is another version that uses a physical controller like a traditional air-hockey table, but that isn’t a multi-touch interface). When I play real air-hockey, I would have been stupid to use one finger, and the true-to-life nature of Surface does reflect this behavior as you can see the user’s controller slip-and-slide around as if he were using only one finger to control a large disk. There are other problems too, such as the controllers sometimes switch players when they get too close. This commentary is not intended to slam Apple’s MacBooks or Microsoft’s Surface but rather to highlight the fact that the multitouch field is wide open. The technical capabilities available today do offer a much more natural and intuitive user interface IF AND ONLY IF we as engineers harness the power and direct it to the greater good.

The software development kits and software development tools for Microsoft, Apple, and Linux all provide built-in, standard support for keyboards and X-Y pointing devices (mouse and track-pad buttons as well). Anyone today can target any operating system and as long as the “input” is translated into one or more keyboard keys and X-Y position, any application can use that input. For example, someone could develop, using standard offerings in any operating system, a 10′-by-10′ room as a trackpad replacement, where one runs around on the floor, jumps up and down, and throws one’s body against a wall to select and move icons around a PC screen. In the multi-touch future, what do we as a development community need to do to secure a similar level of freedom to develop input devices and the programs that interact with them? What do we need to demand as a standard set of provided capabilities so program developers do not have to worry about the input device and input device makers do not have to worry about the programs? While the ultimate answers are up to all of us, the answers being developed today could seriously affect our lives for the future.

The future of Multi-touch is in our hands

“Standards” for multi-touch interfaces are being developed whether we like it or not and now is the time to get involved, make noise, ad shape the future of multi-touch. Let me put forward some of my suggestions for a better multi-touch future. Read them, use them to come up with better ideas, and then get involved by either working with the standards-setters or by implementing a multi-touch device and putting it into people’s hands so we can mobilize more troops in this fight for a great multi-touch future.First, we need a few standard, intuitive gestures and second, we need a standard data interface to provide position data for up to 10 fingers. Standard gestures should cover the most common computer/information device operations, like scroll, zoom, select, move, and grab-and-move, as well as all the new functions multi-touch will enable. What we do not need are multiple company-patented sets of gestures. Rather, let the innovators patent better and smarter techniques of determining the gestures. Note that we do not need a long list of standard gestures, because if that is what we get, users will need to print out the list and paste it to the back of their devices, just like we all did with Grafitti on our Palm PDAs before we stopped using them. Also, gesture detection cannot be forced exclusively upon the operating system nor can it be forced exclusively upon the input device. The best standard solution would accommodate both for maximum flexibility. However, if a choice between operating system or input device is forced, the operating system must be allowed to win.

Do not stop with standard gestures (or the corollary: Do not define everything as a gesture). Define a data standard for multitouch input devices for tracking up to ten independent inputs. Realize that the use of this data for quite some time to come will be application-specific. That said, and over time the best behaviors (we hope) will be adopted into the operating systems, Why ten and not more? Most devices are primarily single-user or have multiple users doing simpler actions on a relatively small screen. Let the special-purpose large-format devices like Surface explore what to do with more than ten inputs, and when something proves itself useful, it can trickle down. The multi-touch train is leaving the station. For those who do not like everything they have seen so far, get involved and push the envelope further. Use multi-touch in new and interesting ways and let others see and hear about your successes and failures (especially the guys in Cupertino and Redmond). The industry can make multi-touch great, but only if we work together.

The Computer and the Abacus_ are They Any Different ??

          The computer and the abacus_ are they any different…?

                       

      Are there any philosophies that would interlock the simple abacus to the computer circuit? The early Chinese juggled and transfixed the beads across the stakes of the abacus to obtain results from addition and subtraction. More poles in the frame of the abacus would imply more digits, which would accommodate as many figures as would contain it…

    The civilization at that period had fewer problems to solve. Their level of technology just reflected that. A precise model made it easier to handle numbers, for a digit limit, in simple, everyday calculations. In a nutshell one could as well gather four stakes to represent a thousand digit bundles, saving him time and energy needed to assemble same number of stakes from reality.

    In intrinsic sense, nothing substantial has changed of late. A strip of film on the first computer device- in essence- and the modern-day computers, align perfectly for a play out in motion picture. Several technological axioms being incorporated into the racks may confuse the storyboard altogether-wiping away its artistic beauty. The rapid advancement in technology would cause a person of Newton’s caliber clueless, as to the underlying mechanism the latest computers operate on. We need not end that way: getting a close-up view on the microprocessor would aid in fitting this clue together_ the past and present computer system: millions of circuits are virtually drowned in a sea of electricity enclosed in their own space. In this seeming universe, different elements respond, in infinite permutations, to a finite impulse, which is well modulated. Though lifeless, the intricate arrangements of the circuits bear evidence to the fact they do interpret the language of arithmetic and logic. By the command of a rational individual, the emergence of its evolving intelligence takes place in earnest. The mechanisms in our world deviate from this… time frame. A flash of lightening would always run faster than a world record holder in sprinting.

     The microprocessor is an interface between the human end of the input, where it receives instructions_ most times storing it in the memory or disk drive_ in the language it is built to discern; and the output which would swiftly receive the results that had been processed, in an audio-visual display, or graphic details a literate individual would read at first glance. An orderly arrangement of the components within the control unit ensures that justice is done on common sense, better known as logic.

      A computer system which is an embodiment of all the parts mentioned above- input, output and control unit. But its branches could extend further: to control other devices to very core of their circuits if possible. For example, experienced pianists knows that a computer system, attuned to a task relevant to the piano or keyboard, would control the quality, rhythm, pitch…and compose any music just as it plays in his imagination; saving the discomfort he would get, having strained his fingers for long.    

      The keyboard viewed from a different context does the task of inputting texts into the system, mainly for word processing.  Typing a key with a document or program for a text (controls) to be displayed on the monitor involves a sequence of functions, which includes retrieving the magnetic or electrical equivalent from its slot in the hard disk, and printing the intelligible soft copy to screen. Word characters grouped, and allocated for a slot in the disk, constitutes a file; deleting the file entails demagnetizing a magnet that had already been magnetized at the slots. A hard copy could be made from the file; that is when the printer is needed.

    By virtue of the overwhelming complexity of the tiny components squeezed into the motherboard, it is no fluke that the computer system is employed to various uses, including the ones yet to be carved out. There is strength in numbers, best explains why the modern computer edges out the abacus to a very wide margin. However dissimilar; both evoke generate same opinion…there seems to be so much order in the inanimate world. The capacity of the computer system has evolved rapidly, with time, to stem the reasonable fraction of the challenges of civilization. So much has taken place in a few thousand years which makes it very young, especially on the evolutionary scale of humans.

       The computer isn’t an extraordinary tool after all: it has no will of its own, and it can’t imagine on its own, but humanity remains dazzled by its accuracy, precision, efficiency and speed. In fact it computes results at the speed of light, which is a common place in our physical world. Electromagnetic waves, adequately rectified by the chips are coded into workable data that generates energy at the slightest contact with hardware. Without the power output, memory capacity and a chip, the amount of energy generated within the control unit alone could cause an electrical mishap.       

      Memory lapses and a relatively limited medium of communication which boils down to the efficiency in the thought processes in humans_ are they to blame…?  However the response, the fact remains that we are wired to control computer and not the other way round: to relish its sheer simplicity and beauty in delineating the dimensional array of the body of knowledge… it cannot be ranked above the infinite intelligence that is squeezed in between the lobes of the human brain_ left for his will to unleash it_ the dignity, and esthetic appeal to nature scattered across peoples and cultures. Humanity travels in a vehicle, bolting across a technology road of computers (and similar ground breaking inventions): As many as the human brain can count; as smart as the human mind can invent; as extraordinary as his sixth sense can foresee.

       How many are seated in this large vehicle…? Perhaps, a century ago, if one had coined the term cybercafé… _as sensible as the word would sound on hearing_ many would likely think he or she is crazy. But we all know now that every syllable in that term in fact coins out correctly to create a beautiful picture in our minds eye- a system of one or two computers, hooked up to a network_ like stakes of the abacus_  with which one can canvass the whole world and beyond just at the touch of a button.    

Light and Sound Machines – Meditation Training Wheels for the Brain?

 

Stress relief, superlearning, heightened focused concentration, creativity, superlearning, easy changework, instant Samadhi. These are goals that can be reached if you use a Light and Sound Machine. Sometimes called a Brain Machine or Audio and Visual Stimulation (AVS), these devices allow the user to reach states of being in a controlled way.

 

Neurologists have studied the brain since the late 1800’s seeking ways to help people with brain injuries and learning dysfunctions. Recent discoveries have reached the general population. If something can help a subject with a learning disability or brain injury, what could it do for a “normal” person?

 

The brain has 100 billion neurons generating and transmitting electrical signals. These signals can be detected by devices called EEG machines (electroencephalograph) One of the big discoveries was the correlation of brain waves to states of being. Stress, alertness, relaxation, mediation, and sleep have been shown to match particular wave patterns. Neurologists have given these brain wave patterns names taken from the ancient Greek Alphabet. Typical alert behavior registers at 30 or more hertz (cycles per second). Alpha state is a condition that is easily achieved by closing the eyes and relaxing. 7-13hz is the range for the Alpha condition. Sleep is the lowest frequency at 0.5 to 3hrz.

 

The most difficult state to achieve and maintain is the in-between state of Theta (3-7hz). It is the state found in the brains of meditation masters. Many students of meditation work for years to reach the Theta state reliably and consistently. Either the mind wanders off into some train of thought or it falls asleep. What if there was a way to quick and easy way to learn how to meditate?

 

In the late 50’s a radio broadcaster named Robert Monroe was experimenting with sound tones for super-learning. He discovered that sound frequencies created certain effects in the brain. When two different frequencies are played in both ears the brain will resonate at the vibration that is the difference between the two tones. If one tone is played in the left ear at 110hz and 100 is played in the right ear the brain waves will resonate at 10hz, which is the same as Alpha Waves. The same effect is triggered by flashing or flickering light. That is why looking at a campfire is so relaxing. The flames just happen to flicker at the alpha rate. He coined the term Frequency Following Response (FFR).

 

Light and Sound Machines are devices that bring that experience from the lab into your home for a fraction of the cost. Typically they consist of a controller, stereo headphones and lightglasses. The controller is a computer that creates the light and sound sessions. There is a user interface for selection of time, and the combination of desired frequencies or brain states. They can be selected manually, or a pre-programmed session can be picked. Headphones provide the sound with high quality comfort. The lightglasses are like opaque sunglasses with two or more LED lights positioned over the eyelids.

 

Here are some features that can be found in superior brain machines:

 

• Rechargeable batteries – nothing worse than a blissful L&S session cut short due to dead batteries.

 

• Input jack – add music or hypnosis recordings to the sessions

 

• Programmability – custom design your own sessions.

 

• Two or more output jacks – share the experience

 

• Ramp up ramp down – a gentle beginning and end

 

• Download sessions via computer – add to your collection

 

• Color choice – red, green or yellow -what is your preference?

 

• Carry case or bag – safely store and transport

 

• Ongoing customer support – what happens when you have a question or problem?

 

My personal experience with brain machines started in the late eighties. I discovered the book Megabrain by Michael Hutchison. He described various technologies for accessing and enhancing brain states such as brain machines, float tanks, nutrition, and electro-stimulation.

 

I purchased a basic AVS unit from a direct mail advertisement and began to use it regularly. I experienced some sublime peak experiences using it along with meditation tapes.

 

The system I am using now is called Nova Pro by Photosonix. I have used it for approximately ten years. It is a real workhorse and creates beautiful experiences for me. The only trouble I have had is with the headphones. They had to be replaced after the phone cord got sucked into a vacuum cleaner. Totally my fault, but easy enough to go to any department store and pick up a new set of headphones.

 

So, where do you get a Light and Sound Machine? There are a number of manufacturers and even more distributors for them. I have discovered that there is a cost savings by going directly to the manufacture if you can. That is why I picked the Photosonix unit. I got a great price for it. I am still using it after all this time.

 

Ebay is a good source for a great bargain on an L&S machine. Some are sold brand new, others are used and at a remarkable savings.

 

Amazon is an excellent source. They carry the book Megabrain and Light and Sound Machines

Computer Processors : Elements and Components

Computer processor is the main part of the computer because it is responsible for all the operations done through the computer. In order to work, some components must exist inside the CPU chip. Here is an overview of such components. The processor is mainly the brain of the computer because it controls all the processes done through the computer from typing to transferring data to remote computers. Inside the processor there are some basic elements the work together to make the processor functional. These elements are as follow:

1. Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU): This is the main block in the processor and the most important. The ALU is responsible for performing all the computations needed through the processor. When the user, for example, enters a numbers to add, this unit makes the computation and outputs the result to the output devices. All the arithmetic operations such as adding, subtraction, multiplying, or division is performed using this unit. Also the logical operations such as ANDing, ORing are also done using this unit. The unit accepts the data, then performs the operations and then output the results to other units inside the processor.

2. Registers: This is another type of devices existed inside the processor. The registers are responsible for saving temporarily the results obtained from other devices such as ALU. One can think of registers as a short term memory as it save some values for a short period of time and then takes other values as needed by the computing devices. For example when you add two numbers if you take the first two numbers and add them and see the result is higher than ten you save the remaining in your head and this saving corresponds to putting the number remained in a register.

3. Buses: This is the third type of components existed inside the processor. The main use of the bus is to transfer any type of data between components inside the processor or among the processor and the remaining devices inside the computer such as motherboard. The buses are divided into three main subtypes:

A. data bus: this type is used to transfer the data bytes between elements inside the processor. For example when the ALU outputs the result it may transfer it to registers by the data bus. It is named so because it is responsible to transfer only data bytes.

B. Address bus: this type of buses is used to fetch certain data from memory based on the number on the address bus. For example if the address bus has a binary value of 1101. Then it will fetch the value in memory in that address. Thus the address bus tells the processing units where to find the data in memory or where to put the computed data in memory.

C. Control bus: this type of buses is used to transfer control signals between elements of the processor. For example, when an instruction is decoded that it has addition operation, it will inform the ALU that the operation is addition by putting certain value on the control bus. When the Processor decodes this value it will understand that the operation is addition based on the value on the address bus.

4. Decoders: this type of devices is used to tell the processor what must be done based on the instructions in the memory written by users. So if ,for example, some bytes are found in the memory that corresponds to an addition instruction the decoder will read them and knows that it is addition based on the bytes contained then it will activate the control lines to inform the processor that it is an addition. Thus the processor is considered an interface between the memory and the processor.