The Age of Touch Computing... Hah!

So it seems like Touch based interfaces are all the rage now thanks to cellular phones, so much so that a lot of PC vendors are now reintegrating the touch screen work they did with Tablet PCs into more mainstream models. Because of this a lot of people are starting to ask is this the "age of touch computing" and my answer is a honest "NO".

I've been working with touch based computing for the past 5 years now, developing artwork and interfaces for electronic gaming (Bingo) for one of the industries leaders. While this might not sound exciting to most of you who are reading this, electronic gaming such as this are for all intents and purposes the current industry leaders when it comes to touch computing adoption and usage. From my own personal experiance during this time I can honestly say that interacting with your computer screen via touch is rather intreging but it is also very novel (much like accelerometers in devices). Sure the demos look really cool and in some instances, almost entirely laid back-casual ones, it does work, but for any real practical computer usage it fails miserably for the following reasons:

1. Button Interaction. For all intents and purposes a button needs to be at least 24x24 pixels in size and you need to leave at least 6 pixels of space between buttons. This way you ensure that the end user can accurately hit the button that they intend to hit, but it also results in a lot of screen space wasted on buttons. Sure you could try to go small like the QWERTY on-screen keyboard with the iDevices... but anyone who has used that thing will tell you how frustrating it can be.

2. Accuracy. A finger is never going to be as accurate as a mouse or a pen, in fact you can be off as much as 20 pixels, or more for people with fat fingers, which is why you need such large buttons. As such using touch computing to control an art program will never happen and seeing someone use touch computing to write and edit a word document or spreadsheet is more of an exercise in anger management than it is at being productive.

3. Resistance. Basicly how the tech works is that it records some sort of resistance and conductivity from the end user. There are various techniques that screen makers use to do this, but the end result is that you pay for what you get. Some models only work well with heat (fingers), others work based on conductivity (fingers, rubber, etc.) and if you are really lucky you will find a screen based on the Wacom technology that also adds in conductivity and pressure. Sadly though I think you will see a lot of vendors use cheap screens which in turn don't always handle resistance well which means that gestures for manipulating the screen are a bit tougher to get in.

4. Gestures and Pattents. The idea of using gestures to control touch based interfaces is old, real old. Hell I can remember seeing tools 10 years ago for 3D art manipulation that let you do gestures on a wacom like tablet. So its no real surprise that gestures are an important aspect of working with touch screens that actually let you manipulate the view to move up/down, left/right, zoom and rotate. Sadly though companies like Apple are trying to pattent these gestures in a vain attempt to look like they are innovators, as opposed to the horrible copy-cat artists that they truely are IMHO.

5. Information overload. Those of you that have tried to browse the web on your Smart Phone will know what I am talking about here, the web (and most applications that we use today) have become cluttered with buttons, links and text. So much so that using a touch device to navigate the web or utilize an application is a real chore because you end up accidentally clicking on a lot of things you never intended to click on. As such to adopt Touch Computing there would need to be a massive industry wide push to remove the information overload that we see on the web and in applications and simply put that will never happen.

Ok so with that said it looks like Touch Computing is doomed to fail, and in many ways it will if people just assume that they can use the current applications that they use today to do Touch Computer without significant changes, but if PC vendors stick to providing novel approachs that appeal to the casual usage of Touch Computing they might just find a niche market, but they definately will not repalce current computer input devices with it, that's for certain.