Two-Finger Input with a Standard Touch Screen

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Tony G: GUI Phooey!: The Case for Text Input

Sarah: Methods of Collecting Internet Content

Patrick S: Shadow Reaching

Two-Finger Input with a Standard Touch Screen

Jorn Loviscach

Fachbereich Elektrotechnik und Informatik

Currently there are many standard touch screens in use, but only very few multi-touch screens. Multi-touch offers many advantages to a single input, but comes at an increased cost. Standard touch screens are cheaper to manufacture and can be converted to a crude multi-touch screen.

The idea is that a touch screen consists of two layers of input, one for x and one for y. A current is passed through each layer, and the x, y position is determined by the resistance. Adding another input becomes a little more tricky. A voltage gradient must be applied to each layer to differentiate between different positions. Each layer is then combined to give the relative positions of each input. Due to the nature of the screen being in the x, y direction only, there can be no more than two separate inputs at a time. 

By using resistance, a measure of pressure can also be determined. A pressure of 0.5 N must be applied to register for a single input. In testing, by using a pen tip, the sensed position is off by at most 5 pixels but when two points are used, the sensed position is off by at most 20 pixels with a fluctuation of 10 pixels.

Although the system does have limitations when compared to a conventional multi-touch screen, it still supports many different applications:

• Finger painting
• Selection
• Pan, zoom, rotation
• Rotary knobs

Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things

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Nicholas H: Emotional Design by Donald Norman

Brad Twitty: Norman's Emotional Desgin

Tony G: Emotional Design - Donald Norman

Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things is yet another book churned out by Don Norman in his ongoing effort to understand the world. This book was published between his Design of Everyday Things and Design of Future things. To sum the book up very briefly, Norman essentially says, "hey, remember my other book? Well, I guess I was wrong, buy this book to and I will tell you why." His Design of Future Things book ties everything together and basically states, "Alright, I have learned from my mistakes, but really buy this book because the future is closer than you think."

OK, enough banter, lets talk emotions. According to this book, people will buy something they like to look at even if it doesn't function well. This is true for most things. "You bought a juicer that doesn't make juice?" "Yeah, but it looks awesome in my breezeway." Norman states that people are attracted to these kind of objects because of an unconscious desire and emotional connection to them. To those who do not understand this phenomenon, just look around you. It is not very easy to design something that is both attractive and functional. Generally, there is a trade-off between the two. For the most part though, attractiveness wins. 

Need proof? Walk into a Mac store. I am not anti-Mac or pro-Microsoft (I use Linux) but its the image that Mac has created that people are attracted to. Macs and PCs both have shortcomings and I understand that, but even if its a terrible product, people will still buy it just because its a Mac. Example: the first iPhone. It didn't quite do anything really well, except it looked cool. Just because of that, people flocked to it and bought it up. There are lots of other phones out there that function just as well or better, but why buy something only because it looks cool? I think this can be related to the scene of a little kid looking into a shop window and going "OOO, shiny!" He doesn't know what it does but only that he wants it because it's shiny.

Overall, I thought this was one of Don Norman's better books. The ideas and concepts presented made a lot more sense and was broken down better. After reading a few of his books though, at this point I believe he is simply just writing for the sake of making books and is trying really hard to come up with good ideas.

Stanley Milgram: The Man Who Shocked the World

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Brad Twitty: The Man Who Shocked Some People
George L: Shocking
Tony G: The Man who Shocked the World

The Man Who Shocked the World, by Thomas Blass was a very interesting book to read. Although I have heard of Stanley Milgram before and his most famous shock experiments, I never knew anything about him and his other experiments. For being a biography, the book has a lot of depth about Stanley's life. Blass goes into detail about his early years and everything that he does up through the day he dies, and beyond. Since this book is a biography, of course Blass would have to talk about his life in detail, but I found the discussion on the experiments to be more interesting. 

In particular, I though that the lost letter experiment was very clever. By dropping letters all throughout town addressed to different opposing parties, Stanley was able to find out people's opinion of the different parties without actually asking them. By counting the number of letters actually mailed to each party, he was able to predict the popularity of each one. 

Another experiment I enjoyed was his six degrees of separation experiment. I have heard of it before, as well as most people, but I did not know that Stanley was the person that came up with the idea. Basically, the idea was to give someone a letter, then tell them about another person that was far away. The goal was to get the letter to the other person only by giving it to someone they think is closest to that person. After mailing lots of letters, he concluded that the average separation between two people was six. The actual values varied though. There was at minimum of 3 or 4 degrees or at most 10 or 12 degrees between two people. I think that by having the Internet and social networking sites, the average separation today would be significantly smaller.

Overall, I thought that it was a very good good and definitely worth reading. The experiments that he conducted were very interesting and really makes you think about the morals of experimentation on people. This is especially so on his shock experiments. How far can someone go in the name of science? How much is too much? If you have any interest in psychology or experimentation on social phenomenon, then this book is a must read.

"It's Mine, Don't Touch!": Interactions at a Large Multi-Touch Display in a City Centre

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Tony G: Assessing Attractiveness in Online Dating Profiles

Ben C: CHI 2008

Patrick S: Audio/Visual Creations on Mobile Devices

"It's Mine, Don't Touch!": Interactions at a Large
Multi-Touch Display in a City Centre

Peter Peltonen, Esko Kurvinen, Antti Salovaara, Giulio Jacucci, Tommi Ilmonen,
John Evans, Antti Oulasvirta, Petri Saarikko

The CHI 2008 paper that I read was on the topic of large multi-touch displays in public areas. The display was mounted in a window between a major train station and bus station in Helsinki, Finland. The area receives a very high amount of traffic, so the location was ideal. The study was conducted over both the usage of the display and the interaction of the people around the display with each other. They recorded data for several weeks and decided to look at the last eight days in July in detail. They used several cameras placed around the display to record details of everyone and their interactions.

The display itself was 2.5 meters wide and could be interacted with by as many different hands that could fit on the screen. The interactions were with pictures downloaded in real time from flickr of only those tagged "Helsinki." There was a time line that allowed the users to see pictures based on when they were taken. The main display area allows users to work with the photos. They can move them around, resize, rotate, throw, or any combination therein that they can come up with.

In the video and other data they recorded they noticed many different types of interactions and usage. Many people would not approach the display unless there was someone already present. When there was people using the display, onlookers would first stop and pause to see what was going on, then slowly take a step-wise approach to the display, waiting for an opening.

There were some individuals that used the display by themselves, but it was used mostly by small groups of people, either two or three in size. Only 18% were individuals. There was rarely a group larger than three that went up to the display. The largest concurrent usage they noted was ten people using both their hands, all working individually. This did not accomplish much because the display actually lended itself to be more easily used with a teamwork rather than individual usage.

Once people started working together, they started enjoying the display more. People would work together to play with the pictures, resizing them and manipulating them. Some groups started to have more fun by throwing pictures at each other. At one point, a group set up a sort of goal with two pictures on one end, while another person attempted to throw a picture through the goal.

When the display started to become crowded, the transitions between usage groups was interesting to note. One group may hand-off to another group by inviting them to take over where they were. Many groups though, just simply left after they noticed that other people were watching and waiting to use the display. Some people would leave their "fingerprints" on the display before they left. One person set up the display to be a sort of photo gallery by arranging the pictures in a neat and orderly fashion before leaving. Another took a photo and enlarged it enough to take up the entire display.

This lead to other problems between users. At one point, a lady was carefully manipulating pictures on one side of the display while a group of people was playing around on the other side. The group had then accidentally enlarged a picture so that it was overlapping the side on which the lady was working on her pictures. The group then noticed this and immediately left. The lady then left as well, more frustrated though. This in turn lead to their theory of conflict management. When one user invaded the space of another unintentionally, these conflicts would arise and have to be resolved. Already noted, one way of resolve was to avoid the conflict. Other was noticed were to apologize and help return things to how they were before.

In using the display, some people would make it out to be a stage to perform. One person set up a comedy act, while another would act as a teacher showing others how to use it. As more people started acting in different areas on the display, they noticed that, although many people tried to keep their interactions separate, more often, they started to talk to the other users and coordinate their activities with strangers.

All in all, I think that the citywall project was a good idea. Even though it was only used to gather research on the usage of large multi-touch displays in a crowded city center, I hope that this leads to more wide spread installations of these kind of displays.