First came touchscreens. We all loved them on PDAs, and they found widespread use in vertical markets. For may years, they remained relatively unchanged, improving in accuracy, but essentially providing a very static user experience.
When Apple brought multitouch to the masses, it was heralded as one of the greatest innovations in years. Everyone is racing to catch Apple, and its ability to provide intuitive, simple user interfaces relying on touch. However, once you get over the gloss and shine, all Apple really did was build a very good interface… multitouch was only icing on the cake, but certainly not the secret ingredient.
The iPhone has only just recently celebrated its first birthday, but already the progress on the “next big thing” is racing ahead in full gear. Take a look at the following take on a “Minority Report” type interface… makes the iPhone look darn right antique!
The HP Touchsmart IQ500 is a new experience in computing and home entertainment. Instead of dragging your mouse around, you can directly interact with the computer screen.
You only need to plug in one power cable, leaving your desktop nice and tidy and making it look more like a television than a computer. You still have option to a regular mouse but don’t think you will want to use it after watching the video clip below.
The full potential of this computer will not be usable until the Windows 7 operating system is released. However this is still one amazing machine for those who are looking for a computer and home entertainment system rolled into one.
Due to me putting my back out yesterday I wasn’t able to unbox the TouchSmart last night so today I had some help and managed to get the unit unboxed. I IMG_0998recorded an unboxing / first impressions video but to be honest its not until I put it in the living room tonight and started using it that I realised how good the machine is. There is two areas to focus on: The all in one hardware which is packaged in a very sleep design and the HP TouchSmart software which is amazingly tactile and had the whole family eager to play with it
First a quick look at the spec:
* Intel Core 2 Duo T5850 * 4GB Ram * 64bit Windows Vista Home Premium * 465GB hard disk * DVD burner * TV Tuner * 22″ Touch Display * Wifi and Bluetooth * Webcam * Wireless keyboard and mouse * All in one design
The TouchSmart software is beautiful,it looks great, it responds to flicks and presses and I love how the faster you swipe the faster it goes. It can play music, videos, and display pictures, there is a touch based web browser, RSS reader and weather apps. This is something I can only really show off in the video but a measure of it’s success is that my wife said “wow can we keep it” rather than the normal “oh no not another box”. It invites you to touch and play with it. My plan was to buy a new Media Center machine and hide it away but I now can see me going for something like this and have it in the living room (still working as a server for my Extenders as well)
ASUS has touted the multi-touch trackpads of its Eee PCs, but every time I have gone to test the multi-touch controls on the pad I can’t do much more than zoom in on a picture by pinching the pad. I are happy to report that finally Eee PC users are able to do more with their fingers.
Its nothing like the N-Trig multi-touch drivers for the Dell XT, but ElanTech, the company responsible for the smartpad on the Eee PCs, has updated the drivers for the touchpad to enable more multi-touch gestures (you can find the drivers here). Thanks to JKKMobile for tipping us off on the new drivers.
I downloaded the drivers to the Eee PC 1000H running Windows Vista and they worked right away (they should work for XP as well; there is no Linux driver version). In the mouse properties window, an extra ElanTech tab allows for tweaking the different multi-touch gestures.
I was then able to create commands that go along with different gestures. For instance, I configured a two finger tap on the trackpad to launch Firefox. Swiping three fingers down will bring up an ALT+Tab command that allows for moving through windows. Swiping three fingers up will launch My Computer.
You can also do more in a photo gallery program. In Windows Photo Gallery, I was able to pinch to zoom, but also able to rotate the picture with a swipe. It is all very MacBook Air like.
I like the gestures the best in the browser. A three finger swipe will move forward or backward between Web pages and two fingers up and down will scroll through the page.
Hewlett-Packard wants to put you in touch with its latest computers. Quite literally.
The company’s handsome new line of all-in-one TouchSmart PCs makes liberal use of a mouse-keyboard alternative you always have with you: your fingers. You can launch applications, play music, crop photos and handle other tasks, just by pressing against the screen.
The machines went on sale in retail stores last week. HP says early sales are trending above forecasts. The $1,499 TouchSmart IQ506 that I’ve been testing – the more expensive of two new models – may already be difficult to come by, says Vickram Bedi, HP’s product management director for worldwide consumer PCs.
As an all-in-one computer, the entire guts of the machine are stuffed underneath the display. TouchSmart belongs in the company of the Dell XPS One, Gateway One and Apple iMac. But none of the others boasts a touch experience.
Touch computing is not a new concept. It just has never really gone mainstream. HP is one of many manufacturers, for example, making tablet PCs that use a pen in lieu of a mouse or keyboard. They aren’t exactly best sellers. Apple is helping boost the visibility of touch through the iPhone.
We knew Dell was planning on updating its first-ever tablet—the Dell XT—with multi-touch capabilities from N-Trig, and now the wait is over. Though many were under the impression that we would have to wait until Windows 7 for multi-touch on a laptop, N-Trig and Dell today released the multi-touch firmware update for the Vista running XT. Over the last few weeks, I have been trying out the new multi-touch capabilities and can confidently say that it sure beats the multi-touch trackpads of the Eee PCs and the MacBook Air.
How to do you perceive your home in 2013? Do you want all the devices in your home to run with your voice common and simply want to navigate through using your hands? Then you can surely dream about it because human touch and natural user interface is something that companies are seeing their future in. Some laptops and handheld devices already use biometric finger scans to access stored data and can easily recognize the human touch as input device. Well, these things might come into other device within your home too making your life much easier than ever before.
The Media Computing Group at RWTH-AACHEN University has developed an application to allow users to control a laptop via a multi-touch iPhone. Although the demo shows how to rotate and resize images, the “multiple views” section is interesting. Like an Etch-a-Sketch, you shake the iPhone to reset the images.
I’ve been toying with ideas about ways to create user-friendly interactions between screens of all sizes. This approach intrigues me.
It’s definitely not a mobile pc, but it is a touch PC, so I hope this forum is okay for this.
I work at an Office Depot and we just put our TouchSmart IQ504 on display (the 2nd generation of the TouchSmart) and I though I’d post up my first impressions.
We currently have it set up next to the first generation of TouchSmart and the size difference is amazing. The entire unit is about the same thickness as just the first generation’s screen. It stands on two small feet, but feels very stable. The setup of it is a snap, literally one plug and then a connect button on the mouse or keyboard to get it set up.
In terms of bloatware, I took a quick look at the taskbar. It was definitely not the most compact. I’m sure a couple of them were for the screen and mouse/keyboard, but it could definitely do with some cleaning up.
As for the new touch experience. The computer initially booted into the normal Vista desktop, and I did see the TIP – something I haven’t noticed on the old Touchsmart. The new TouchSmart interface is a huge improvement over the old Touch home. The sliding interface is pretty smooth as long as you don’t do fast movements with your hand. It will pick up quick movements but is a little delayed on the sliding. It seemed almost as though the graphics card wasn’t quite powerful enough to keep up, just a little delay all around on the interface.
IMO if you’re looking for an all-in-one PC as opposed to a tower + monitor combo, then this is a great model. That being said, if you can get by with the standard combo, you’re going to get more performance for the money. The new TouchSmart would definitely make a nice bedroom or hub computer. The large screen combined with thin wireless keyboard would make it excellent in the bedroom as a TV.
We have been developing a new software for tracking and object handling in vvvv. We started from scratch due to performance issues and now the system is reactive and fast – just the way we always wanted it to be. David Dessens did a great job there! Still, there are a couple of issues to be solved. We’ve tested and prototyped some applications, like a memory, a media browser, a synthesizer, and of course abstract touch-sensitive visuals are always great fun to play with.
This video shows the current Work-In-Progress (next time in HDV again, this is plain DV quality):
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