Richard Dale complained about the Apple iPhone’s halfdone interface that lacks a kind of haptic feedback for the virtual buttons apparently. But perhaps Apple might increase the iPhone’s price a little more and use stuff like VibeTonz? After all that is what Samsung is doing already.
Although I have never had the chance to get my hands on a Wii system I still think such interfaces like the Wii controller are finally moving things again. After all it’s so embarrasing e.g. seeing presenters pointing with wooden sticks around a projected picture from their computers in 2007. And things like vibration alarms of mobiles and force-feedback joysticks were only the beginning and are with us for so long already. Also mouse gestures, think KHotkeys 🙂
Still there are quite a few nice things in the description of the iPhone’s other interface features.
Like giving input by shaking it (so one could swing a heart to call her girlfriend?). It was first when I saw what people made of the harddisk protection system driver by Robert Love (so give the laptop a smack to change virtual desktops, or play Neverball by swinging it… more left, leeeft, bah…) when I realised that here the input device can be the device itself. Oh dear, obviously one is very much fixed to the idea of external things like keyboard and mouse, to things he knows.
Or the multipoint touch screen. The idea seems to be pretty old, but why hasn’t it made it’s way already into mainstream products? No idea. But perhaps it will soon. Read here for a current demo of a 36-inch-wide screen with an allfinger interface. Watch the corresponding video. Useful? More than videocaves and datagloves? And will it support multi users concurrently, with rights management (he, that was my lava glob)?
For an output interface, this 3D screen surely needs some more research, I guess 🙂
I only hope that FLOSS, especially KDE, will not be left out of the game. Will free phone projects like OpenMoKo help? Let’s try.
Attracted by virtual constructs 