Microsoft puts finger on better gestures
While much of the attention on multitouch surrounds what devices the interface will next find its way onto, Microsoft is also looking at how to improve the gestures themselves.
At a computer interface conference in Boston, Microsoft is presenting ideas for how to perform 27 different commands--ideas that stemmed by showing test subjects a set of commands and asking them to do the most logical gesture. Those that were popular among multiple people were the ones the researchers said made the most sense.
Microsoft Research used test subjects to try and create natural touch gestures to represent 27 common computer commands. Here was a popular suggestion for the "undo" command.
(Credit: Microsoft)"If they are going to be universal gestures we want them to be very natural," Microsoft researcher Meredith Morris said in an interview last week.
The research comes as the use of such gestures is starting to take off. Multitouch gesture controls are already an integrated part of the iPhone and Microsoft's Surface and are also supported on some notebook trackpads. Windows 7 adds operating system-level support for multitouch gestures.
While widely praised as intuitive, Microsoft's research shows only some of the gestures used on multitouch devices make sense, Morris said. Other gestures, particularly those that involve using a specific number of features, are actually not very intuitive, Morris said.
That's because people tend not to associate gestures with the number of features they use.
"They don't assign meaning to that," Morris said, noting that Microsoft's research showed people tended to use one, two or three fingers interchangably when performing a gesture. "We should be careful about that."
What users did like to do, Morris said, was make gestures in the air, something that today isn't supported by devices like the Surface or the iPhone, though other research prototypes have focused on mid-air gesture input.
"That speaks to how you might design next generation systems," Morris said. "You might want additional camera so you can begin to get some of these."
The most popular suggestion for summoning help was for a finger to draw the shape of a question mark.
(Credit: Microsoft)In some cases, Morris said the research suggested multiple ways of generating a command. To activate the "help" command, for example, the most popular suggestion was to draw a question mark on the surface with a finger. However, one participant suggested another way might to be to bring their hand toward themselves, as if to beckon for assistance.
Where the same suggestion was made by several people, Morris said her team tried to incorporate multiple gestures for the same command.
Morris is presenting a paper on the gesture research, as well as several other papers at the CHI 2009 conference, an event that brings academics and folks from the business world together to look at human-computer interaction. In all, Microsoft is presenting or co-presenting 25 papers, more than 10 percent of the total, Morris said.
Among the presentations Microsoft made at the event last year was MySong, a method for automatically adding background instruments to vocal tracks--a project that eventually became the .
Here were the suggestions for two of the most often used commands--copy and paste.
(Credit: Microsoft)
During her years at CNET News, Ina Fried has changed beats several times, changed genders once, and covered both of the Pirates of Silicon Valley. These days, most of her attention is focused on Microsoft. E-mail Ina. 
Thanks for your input. You'll note that we are doing just that but by claiming that these gestures are naturally obvious (since Joe Public came up with them), we'll be able to hammer Apple's patents....
Surface was out before iPhone and had these type of gestures before the iPhone was even concieved
Yes, you can do those things... with a PEN, like you mentioned. I can do those things too, for many, many years using a Wacom tablet on my Mac.
But this refers to TOUCH. Not a pen...
Apple has been the copier not microsoft. Microsoft should actually stop showing their stuff off and just release when ready.
Oh, you're mistaken...
"All-new Multi-Touch trackpad
Multi-Touch comes to MacBook Pro in a spacious, smooth trackpad that is also the button."
"Without a separate button, your hands have 39 percent more room to move on the large, silky glass surface. Use two fingers to scroll up and down a page. Pinch to zoom in and out. Rotate an image with your fingertips. Swipe with three fingers to flip through your photo libraries. Swipe with four fingers to show your desktop, view all open windows, or switch applications. If you?re coming from a right-click world, you can right-click with two fingers or configure a right-click area on the trackpad. The more you use the Multi-Touch trackpad, the more you?ll wonder what you ever did without it."
Source: http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/features-15inch.html
You know, it's very easy to make comments like that to sound all-knowing but you haven't actually provided any evidence. I could quite as easily tell you that you're uninformed because Apple registered multi-touch patents before Microsoft, which is as unsubstantiated as your statement. In order to avoid being dismissed, can I suggest that you provide evidence to back-up your comment and to educate the uninformed, such as the dates and patent numbers of the patents that you refer to?
Personally, I doubt very much that Microsoft patented touch technology prior to Apple simply given that Apple had a product long before Microsoft did (with the ill-fated Newton). However, I think it is fair to say that other companies were working in that area before Apple so the copying statement does apply. Frankly, I find this whole discussion of who copied whom to be utterly pointless and incredibly boring.
dear Microsoft how bout you make Improvements to your
Dis Functional O.S you call Windows rather than Spending time and money on pointless things like this , and ofcourse the new pointless ad campaign
I can bet if Apple did this your mindset would be different.
By the way, I'm using Ubuntu 8.10 while trying to fix my roommates installation of XP. Mine's been up for almost a full 3 months with only 5 restarts. His was restarted 5 times just counting today.
you guys are acting like Windows is the holy grail of all OS'es with no equal !
do you guys really believe that Windows is perfect ? just curious !
1 Windows isn't perfect
2 Tthe ad campaign that they are doing right now has more facts than Apple get a mac ads. the new MS ads suck, but at least they're better than Apple's
3 I would like to have gestures on my 24 inch monitor
some people need/want stuff that you don't, don't assume that since you don't need gestures on a 24"screen, no one does.
@tm_anon
Go Linux!
too bad people are scared of open source for some odd reason
I for one rarely ever encounter problems in Windows. The last bluescreen I saw on my system was installing Nvidia drivers for a 7950gx2 when Vista first came out... Nvidia drivers were notoriously buggy for Vista 64 but other than that, my system has ran tiptop since day one. My XP boxes are issue free as well mainly because I know what I am doing. When you got some jackass 17 yr old downloading porn and warez off Kazaa, then you are going to see problems. So basically 90% of market share sadly also means Windows gets 90% of the world's idiots. You put that many idiots in front of OS X and they are bound to screw it up... and that would also shift the focus of malware over to OS X. Stupid people will install and click Next through anything! Doesn't matter what OS they are on!
I run XP, Vista, Ubuntu and OS X... I like each for different reasons. If I could run games and photoshop natively in Linux without going through Wine... I would drop my XP boxes totally. I think OS X is designed beautifully... in fact I have themed one of my XP boxes to look and act like OS X using flyakiteosx.com (which isn't loading now unless you do more results)
The first time I saw multitouch was during a Radiohead concert around 2001/2002... I don't know the device they were using then, but it's very similar to the Lemur controller (JazzMutant) that many bands are using now.
It's completely ironic that seven7dust proclaims that Windows users act like Windows is the holy grail of OS's when he is the exact same way with OS X. I doubt that he could ever issue a nonbiased opinion about any OS since nothing lives up to his cult like views on Apple.
fair enough !
but still can you help me understand how gestures will be better than a mouse and a keyboard !
The way I see it the only benefit for this is in netbooks probably !
they'll be good marketing gimmicks though !
Put another way, I think Microsoft is trying to fit physical gestures to computing operations whereas what they should be doing is fitting computing operations to physical actions that we already do.
Because the actions are only done in a computing environment, there are no natural gestures for them.
A better way to go about this would be to ask them to perform an action physically, watch the gestures, then make those gestures into a computing action.
For example, if I was going to use just my hands to blend two photographs together, I would rip and tape. this means I would use my thumb and forefinger (doesn't matter which finger) and rip away the excess, then I would get some tape, tear a piece off and tape the photo into place.
Using a gesture involving thumb and forefinger, this could be accomplished by a pinching motion to indicate gripping, a pulling motion to indicate tearing along a path, rotation on your thumb to indicate lifting and moving. All it would take is the addition of a sidebar to place pieces that you wish to "tape" down later.
The "taping" action could be just pressing your forefinger (finger doesn't matter) to the multitouch pad and dragging your thumb-pad across the area to be "taped" down.
The idea is the same, the function is basically the same, the motions just make more sense by following what we can actually do with our hands.
What Microsoft is trying to do here is completely backwards. They're trying to give you computing tasks and form gestures around those. It's the same thing everyone else is doing and it just doesn't fit into the realm of natural motions.
tm_anon, think about it this way. MS comes up to you and says "How would you blend two different photographs using gestures?". You then describe or demonstrate how you would do it. Then they ask me, Kelmon, and a thousand other people the same thing. From all of that information they'll be able to say "87% of people use this basic set of gestures with this degree of variance" They can then use that information to come up with a set of gestures. In effect, they're doing exactly what you think they should do - they're just asking actual users instead of coming up with it internally.
I honestly don't think that you do - whatever you come up with won't be natural and therefore unintuitive. Trying to fit gestures to computing operations that have no real parallel in the physical world won't make that much sense to the user. Take, for example, the suggested slash gesture for a "Cut" operation - no way is that going to come naturally to people. The suggested "Undo" gesture does make sense because crossing a word out on a page is exactly what we do when we make a mistake. You could, for example, request a file or other object to be opened/run by making a gesture with palm of your hands pressed together and then parted like opening a book in charades (you'd need a camera for this one, of course). Humans are physical in nature and I just don't think we grasp the concept of a physical gesture to represent abstract concepts. I mean, if you needed Help on a subject, would you really think to draw a question mark?
I entirely agree that it is good that Microsoft is trying to find out what people think. I just tend to think that on this subject they are trying to take a concept in the wrong direction. Frankly, for some of these concepts I think that speech is probably the best way of achieving the goal and the combination of that and multi-touch could be very powerful.
It's easier to build good, solid features if the platform they're build on is solid. You wouldn't build a house on top of a cracked foundation for the very same reason.
this OTOH not so much
I also wanted to add that I don't understand people like seven7dust and AJ Pants, which think that everything MS does is a bad and they have this need to always trash MS. I think that MS is actually quite innovative in a lot of things, and I'm sorry to disappoint you but most of the people think the same.
the addon you're referring to is FireGestures, right?
FireGestures is one of the more popular ones, but there's a few other ones as well. I think the first one I saw was MouseGestures way back in 2004.
just stated my opinion !
I still stand by my original post Touch gestures on 20-24" monitors is pointless,
maybe it'll work on netbooks who knows ?
Mouse gestures OTOH now thats useful stuff !
Swipe to Type
Here?s an alternate text input technique for the iPhone and similar devices that might be faster and more accurate for many people. It uses a feature the iPhone already has, a multi-touch screen, rather than external hardware such as a collapsible Bluetooth keyboard. You not only don?t have to look at the screen, with a little practice you can enter text in the dark even while bouncing around, as on a bus or subway. And since the only requirements for text input are basic hand coordination and a sense of touch, it makes the iPhone much more usable for the visually impaired and those with limited hand-eye coordination.
What is it?
* It uses a well-established open source standard?International Morse Code. But instead of short and long key presses, dots are input by short swipes and dashes by long swipes.
* Speed of input doesn't matter. Unlike regular Morse, which assumes a pause in sending to be a break between letters, user input can be as slow or fast as the users wants without error. Letters are distinguished by alternating swiping right/left and then up/down. (A user-set delay inputs the last character, i.e. one not followed by a swipe in a different direction.)
* Swipe mode changes when the user rotates the screen.
* Because Morse Code is already optimized for fast input in most languages, text can be entered very fast. The more often a letter is used, the shorter its Morse Code equivalent is. An e is a single short swipe and a T is a single long swipe. It couldn't be easier.
Additional Features
Morse input would also take advantage of a touch screen?s flexibility to add features that International Morse Code doesn?t have. Examples include:
* Lowercase letters are made by swiping left-to-right or up-to-down.
* Uppercase letters are made by swiping right-to-left or down-to-up. Alternately, two-finger swipes could be used for uppercase.
* Common punctuation uses diagonal swipes, i.e. upper-left to lower-right for a space, lower-left to upper-right for a period or a period plus space. Diagonal swipes with two or three fingers could have other meanings.
* Circling CCW might delete the previous character. Circling CW might enter a Return. Alternately, a short shake of the iPhone deletes the previous letter, while a longer shake deletes the previous word.
* Because text input is always a swipe that doesn't need for anything to be displayed for it to work, the entire screen is free for other uses, either display or touching without swiping. It can be used to display the text being entered, to have buttons for commands, or to show a chart for those just learning Morse. This makes maximum use of scarce screen space.
* Certain easy-to-make touches could be used to make common commands easy to do. Touching the keyboard with another finger, perhaps the thumb in the lower-left corner for right-handed people, might signify something. For instance, it might bring up a scrolling list of long, user-set text strings (i.e. a phone number or address) from which the user could select. Inside applications, it could be used for something important. Inside an email program, for instance, it could send the just-entered email. Inside a writing program, it could be used to start a new paragraph.
* In learner mode, the screen would display the Morse alphabet and text input would be on a scrolling line. Letters or words could be spoken as typed to speed up learning and accuracy.
For those willing to learn Morse, which is far easier than most people think (especially for sending), it offers a fast, virtually error-free text interface for the iPhone, one that has tactile feedback built into the design. Most important of all, it?s a text input technique that doesn?t require users to constantly look at the screen. Since the target is the entire screen, it?s impossible to miss and the touch of the screen provides the tactile feedback lacking in the on-screen keyboard.
Feel free to pass this idea along to anyone who might want to implement it.
?Mike Perry, KE7NV, Seattle
http://www.ted.com/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html
Oh, you're mistaken...
"All-new Multi-Touch trackpad
Multi-Touch comes to MacBook Pro in a spacious, smooth trackpad that is also the button."
"Without a separate button, your hands have 39 percent more room to move on the large, silky glass surface. Use two fingers to scroll up and down a page. Pinch to zoom in and out. Rotate an image with your fingertips. Swipe with three fingers to flip through your photo libraries. Swipe with four fingers to show your desktop, view all open windows, or switch applications. If you?re coming from a right-click world, you can right-click with two fingers or configure a right-click area on the trackpad. The more you use the Multi-Touch trackpad, the more you?ll wonder what you ever did without it."
Source: http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/features-15inch.html
For those who have been see those things they work in Microsoft's R&D, that has been a consistent question.
You're wrong.
iPhone was announced January 9, 2007.
MS Surface was announced May 29, 2007.
The iPhone was introduced almost 6 months before MS Surface...
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iphone
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Surface
And the is AWESOME!!
Wow, I just defended M$. I feel dirty.
- by abcd9009 April 6, 2009 2:21 PM PDT
- It doesn't matter who copies whom. What matters is who can make a difference. And clearing learning from the past, Microsoft will always be ahead than Apple when it comes to "making a difference".
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(64 Comments)Simple example, Xerox was the first to invent GUI interface. Apple copied it and created Mac, Microsoft later copied it and created Windows. In addition to just copying, Microsoft will gave away a lot of copies of Windows to people who can't afford it, people living in poor countries and making Windows cheap enough than any Avg Joe can afford it, even people living in the poorest nation.
Compare that to Apple. Granted Apple is far superior when it comes to features but how many people outside US, EU, Japan can claim they EVER used a Mac.
I am just saying it's good to share the wealth.For Apple it has always been "my way or the highway" as compared to Microsoft which is willing to make sacrifices in order to make everyone happy. One reason why Windows is so inferior to OS X is because Windows has to take into account the requirements from million vendors and yes it does crash more than a Mac but at the end of the day, you get your job done. How many OS you can claim that actually do that.
I know people will be saying Linux also does that but there's one difference between Linux and Windows - Anybody can use Windows because they have used it forever. No matter how easy Linux is, the reality is as of today Linux is limited only to tech guys.