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)From the moment I played with the iPhone and Microsoft's Surface tabletop computing technology, I have been waiting for pinch-zooming and other motions to make their way into mainstream PCs.
The wait is essentially over.
Although it's the MacBook Air that's been getting all the ink for adding such gestures, Synaptics announced at the Consumer Electronics show last week a version of its touchpad for Windows notebooks that will also support a range of gestures, including methods for continuous scrolling, zooming in and out, and trackball-like movement.
And that's just the start.
"There will be more gestures forthcoming," said Mark Vena, vice president of Synaptics' PC business unit.
Gesture touchpads do everything that ordinary touchpads do, of course. What they add is the ability, through software, to translate finger movement into on-screen motion. For instance, the touchpad on the MacBook Air translates a twist of the fingers in the rotation of a photo on-screen.
It will take a little time before Windows PCs with the new gesture-capable touchpads hit the market. Vena said that the first models should ship in late March or early April, though he wouldn't say which computer makers have signed up for the new version. Vena said the MacBook Air announcement is helping his business, particularly with computer makers that were on the fence about redesigning models to include the new touchpad.
"None of them have been dismissive of gestures," he said. "Some have been a little more, shall we say, deliberate."
Gestures have been slowly making their way onto PCs for a while, mainly via the notebook's trackpad. For some time, Mac and Windows laptop owners have been able to scroll up and down a page by swiping their fingers along the pad.
Microsoft included support for gestures in its earliest plans for Vista, but was primarily focused on using a pen, not touch.
Toshiba showed off PCs and laptops at the Ceatec trade show in October that could be operated by gestures. Flick your wrist to the right, the page goes forward. To the left, back. Also at Ceatec, Sharp showed off a gesture screen that takes commands from three fingers. Pioneer has a GPS car unit that can be operated with gestures: touch the hologram for parking and the GPS unit tells you where the nearest lot is located.
Vena gives a lot of credit to Apple for getting consumers excited about the concept.
"The iPhone has done a great job of educating the marketplace on the benefits of touch technology and what you are able to do with it," he said. "There's just a lot more (understanding) in the minds of consumers in terms of what gestures are capable of."
Adding such gestures should be a no-brainer. It's just a better experience, much like the graphical user interface was eminently more enjoyable for most people than a character-based system. Die-hard DOS fans might have a point that command-line interfaces can be more efficient for those who like memorizing commands, but most people prefer a more natural way of navigating through a computer.
Such is the case, I believe with gestures. Take zooming in and out of the screen. Apparently, there is a feature in Windows, using the control key and the scroll wheel, that enables zooming. I didn't know about it until Synaptics mentioned it Wednesday (although I'm sure my educated readers have been doing this for years). But any product that lets me pinch to zoom in and out leaves an indelible impression in my mind.
Whether it's Surface, the iPhone, or the new MacBook Air, they all make me want to do the most important gesture--reach for my wallet.
CNET News.com's Michael Kanellos contributed to this blog.
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