Hard hard user interfaces.

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Started as someone doing ActionScript in Macromedia Flash I got into Human-Computer-Interaction after watching Jeff's Hann's multi-touch work. That's the power of a really cool demo that inspired the birth of NUIGroup community which spawned 1000s of makers all around the world making their own projector camera multitouch systems. All of it became mainstream once Apple released the iPhone to the world, and also gave birth to my interest in human-centered engineering. I spent some 10 years after that playing with sensors, haptics, and gestural interfaces through multiple input modalities but nothing stuck as much as multi-touch did. Thanks to Apple's execution. Everyone's phone/tablet interaction is default multitouch. (unless you have a visual impairment). Primsense evolved into Kinect, then came Wiimote, Leap but nothing stuck.  for speech, it was Amazon's Alexa. Latest news , that its going to lose Amazon 10B.  Like I am writing this post through my keyboard a...
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New Multitouch Notebook, Mozilla Labs, GSoC and fun

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Its week two weeks since I finally bought myself a Acer Aspire 5738 pzg multitouch (actually dual-touch) notebook.

Its a welcome change, since for the past two years our multitouch experiments required a lot of background effort due to our utter dependence on our custom built MT screen. The capacitive screen is good, its responsive and precise. They've a Python apploader called Acer Touch Portal which runs a couple of cool Microsoft Surface apps (Globe, Collage, Blackboard etc.). Overall UI of the app is not so impressive though. Form-factor wise its just a laptop, so multitouch is not going to add much of functionality to the device, apart from merely being a show-off feature :) The app looks like more of an Acer's attempt to show Multitouch proof of concept! Looking at the Multitouch hullabaloo everywhere, i didn't expect that to happen atleast.
For DIY and multitouch community its a good tool for quick development and testing of apps.
I used Mozilla Firefox and IE7 which natively ships with Windows 7- the touch based webbrowsing experience was shoddy, just like i imagined when i tried HP TouchSmart PC hands-on. Both these miss the intuitive experience. I'll rate the multitouch functionality:7/10 and usability 4/10



iPad's Safari browser is a neat POC which I'll pick up cues for my Google Summer of Code- Mozilla Labs 2010 project from.
- Simple interface
- Lesser Buttons overhead
- Neat Design and immersive ux that blends right into the user's subcon
- Meant for multitouching

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