A team of students from my Winter 2006-7 Term Website Design & Implementation Class will be implementing their re-design for the Center website. The first priorities for the site are:
The about-to-be-released Apple iPhone has a "new user interface based on a large multi-touch display [...], letting you control everything with just your fingers." Apple is using a multi-point gesturing system for this user interface, completely replacing the single-point gesture device (the stylus) and the keyboard.
Jeff Han and others have been doing very intesting work in the area of "Multi-Touch Interaction Research", which is simply "bi-manual, multi-point, and multi-user input on graphical interaction surfaces". Demos found here and here show something of what can happen when you re-think the way the user interfaces with the desktop.
The old metaphors for the full-screen desktop do not work so nicely for the handheld "palmtop" environment. WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointing device) does not work well in a handheld environment, primarily because the single-point gesturing device (for which read "mouse or stylus") does not work well in a handheld environment. So the question becomes, what does? Perhaps the above materials on "bi-manual, multi-point, and multi-user input on graphical interaction surfaces" point the way.
RIT is in the unique position of also housing NTID. Anyone observing NTID students knows that handheld devices for personal data staorage and personal communications have penetrated the deaf community in the United States quite deeply. NTID students form a uniquely experienced pool of handheld device users to ask about what sorts of gesturing systems and gestures "work well" and do not "work well" on handheld devices, and a unique audience to observe actually using such devices relatively intensely (for a US audience).
I wish to form an R & D team with faculty from NTID, IT, and Business to start. The team will begin by developing a methodology and gathering data to begin answering the following questions:
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Last modified: 19 Mar 2007 01:01:53 PM