The Death of Rollovers

I just realized today how rollovers don't work on touchscreen displays - I know this probably seems obvious to those with experience designing applications for touchscreen displays. I had this realization when I was visiting the Guggenheim website on an iPhone. The home page for the Guggenheim organization features a pictures of their museums and the names of the city appear only on rollover. Therefore, I was only able to see the name of the city where a museum was located only when I clicked on the picture of that specific museum. As touchscreen displays continue to become more commonly available, designers will not be able to rely on rollovers to display useful information about the behavior of a button.

Wii Hacks from Johnny Lee

I always thought the Wii was pretty cool, but now I understand the true potential of what you can do with the Wii's technology - if you have the courage and time to tinker with it. Johnny Lee is a researcher who became a star on YouTube for his ability to hack the Wii remote to create a low-cost multi-touch whiteboards and and head tracking device for desktop visual reality (VR) displays (check out the video below). Another video from Johnny that is not nearly as popular but more informative, is Johnny's talk at Ted ealier this year.

Multi-Touch Whiteboard Video from YouTube


Video of Johnny Lee's Talk from Ted


If you have the time and the motivation, check out Johnny's site where you can access the how-to instructions and software required to re-create these awesome gadgets for your personal use.

Multi-Touch Interfaces From IDEO and Others

I recently came across a few posts on the IDEO Lab blog about multi-touch computing. I am a huge fan of touch computing. My experiences with these types of interfaces are limited to the iPhone, the SmartBoard from my wife's classroom, and random retail and public instalations that use Microsoft's Surface or other technologies.

I had never really thought much about the collaborative potential of large scale multi-touch interfaces. It seems obvious now, after reading about the IDEO Lab's experiments. Here is a great quote from one of their blog postings about the collaborative nature of multi-touch systems: "multi-touch, particularly on large displays, assumes multiple inputs at the same time. Multiple fingers, yes, or multiple hands from multiple people. In other words, it’s a system designed for “us” instead of for “me” — for collaboration instead of heads-down work."

Here are three videos that show the potential of multi-touch systems in action. The first video covers a talk from Jeff Han at TED in 2006. In this talk he introduces his Perceptive Pixel multi-touch display and makes the case for basing future computer interfaces on this type of technology. The second video documents a "Home-Brew" project from IDEO, check out this story about how they put this together. The third video shows a prototype from Perceptive Pixel.


Jeff Han's Talk at Ted




IDEO's Multi-Touch Project




Perceptive Pixel's Multi-Touch Project