TouchSmarter: Touch Screen Gadgets

After months of rumors, Microsoft researchers are taking the wraps off a prototype that uses an internal projection and vision system to bring a spherical computer display to life. People can touch the surface with multiple fingers and hands to manipulate photos, play games, spin a virtual globe, or watch 360-degree videos.

Sphere, as it’s known, is expected to be shown publicly for the first time Tuesday at Microsoft’s Faculty Summit in Redmond. For now, it’s purely a research project. The company says it doesn’t currently have plans to offer it as a product. The idea is to see what the technology can do, and how people will use it.

“It’s really an exploration of ideas,” explained Hrvoje Benko, the Microsoft researcher spearheading the project, during a sneak preview Monday afternoon.

Sphere is a cousin of the Microsoft Surface tabletop computer, already being used in retail and hospitality settings. The underlying hardware for Sphere is sold commercially by Global Imagination of Los Gatos, Calif., but Microsoft researchers made numerous enhancements and developed specialized software.

Video: Microsoft’s Sphere display in action.

First impressions - Very nice and smooth UI. The use of touch is amazing compared to using the touchscreen on a WM device. Everything is just ‘made’ to touch, unlike the Windows Mobile devices. Yes, there are programs out there to make WM more touch friendly, but out of the box, there is no comparison.

GottaBeMobile - First Weekend With The iPhone : Tablet PC & Mobile PC News & Video Reviews, and Tablet PC Forums.

What better way to do market research than to ask students for their input on what they consider are important aspects of computers. Lenovo employed two interns over the summer who were very familiar with tabletPC’s and education. They created a head-to-head video comparison between their HP tablet and the Lenovo X61t. Being a tabletPC user in the education space myself, I have to agree with everything they say. There are parts where it does sound like a propaganda video for Lenovo but the students’ comments reflect real-world accounts of what OEM’s need to keep in mind when designing their next crop of tablets.

GottaBeMobile - Students Discuss Basic Needs For Tablets : Tablet PC & Mobile PC News & Video Reviews, and Tablet PC Forums.

How to tether your iPhone to Vista in 5 easy steps

Here are some very easy steps for how to tether your Vista laptop to your iPhone.

shahine.com/omar/ - How to tether your iPhone to Vista in 5 easy steps.

NetShare, the current magician of the Apps Store (it keeps disappearing/reappearing), can let you tether your iPhone 3G in a fairly straight forward manner. Here are some instructions on doing so with Vista.

Back in June, Aiptek announced their diminutive PocketCinema V10 projector at Computex. Using 3M’s LED projector technology, the PocketCinema V10 was able to project a 50-inch image at 640×480 resolution.

GottaBeMobile - Tiny Projector Showing Huge Promise : Tablet PC & Mobile PC News & Video Reviews, and Tablet PC Forums.

While not being touch related, this is still a great piece of kit… imagine the day that devices like these are built into iPhones, and in addition to projecting images, they could detect when you interact with those images. The future looks bright.

When I first heard about the Pogo Stylus, a stylus designed specifically for the iPhone/iTouch, I thought it was a joke. After spending some quality time with it, I can tell you it’s no joke. The Pogo Stylus is a handy and functional tool that can be purchased at TenOneDesign.com for $24.95. Check out this GBM Shortcut to learn a little more about the Pogo Stylus.

GottaBeMobile : Tablet PC & Mobile PC News & Video Reviews, and Tablet PC Forums.

 To clarify something that this video focuses on, the reason normal styluses do not work is that the iPhone screen relies on the fact that your finger will conduct electricity, where as all of the items tested in the video will not. I looked for more precise explanations, but could not find any, feel free to post some in the comments.

Hearing there was a stylus for the iPhone, i thought it could be useful for some… after seeing it I am not so sure. For me, given the inherent abilities of the iPhone, the only way a stylus would help is if it had a very narrow tip, for drawing/character recognition. This stylus does not, so it certainly is not something I would consider.

I decided to give the virtual keyboard from bgfl.org a try using my Dell Latitude XT Tablet PC. I’d like to see folks with regular laptops do this…

GottaBeMobile : Tablet PC & Mobile PC News & Video Reviews, and Tablet PC Forums.

 This is pretty cool… I wonder if this was inspired by the iPhone app(s) that provide similar functionality.

I was in summer holidays and returned yesterday. I installed the multitouch driver and was not impressed by the first experience. It does not work as smooth as I expected (iPhone or iPod touch!) and was woundering why given the CPU&GPU power available on the XT, or is it the digitizer&the driver?
Especially the zoom gesture, it hardly works with one hand (for me). It works OK using both hands, however.

Multitouch Problem? - Tablet PC and Mobile PC Forums.

It seems that, for the moment, other vendors are having issues meeting consumer expectations for multitouch, now that Apple has set the bar so high.

A while ago Natural User Interface was on French national television together with French partner byVOLTA to demonstrate NUI’s multitouch table.

See the video below (in French).

I blogged a while ago, about the fact that I was speaking at a conference in Malmo, Sweden, regarding new interaction techniques, focussed on multitouch technology.
The presentation and the video are now online and can be found at: http://www.businesstobuttons.tv/webtv/89.html

Big thanks go out to colleague Pawel Solyga (Software Engineer at NUI and one of the co-founders of NUI Group) for helping me putting together this presentation.