Multi-touch screen will soon be obsolete

How often have you wished that your coffee table doubled as a musical instrument? If your answer was “all the time,” I have good news for you: computer science graduate students at the U of M’s Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) lab are currently working on making your life-long dream a reality. Now, you might be wondering what HCI is exactly, and what a bunch of grad students intend to do to your coffee table. I intend to elaborate on this a bit more, but the short version is that HCI is a field in computer science that is concerned with studying our interactions with computers — a direct result of this type of study might just be that your future coffee table will look like something taken straight out of Minority Report.

The main goal of the HCI discipline is, in fact, to find new and improved ways for us to interact with technology. In addition to this, researchers also strive to reduce the amount of error derived from such interactions. This type of “translation error” is quite common in the digital age we live in — as an example of when things go wrong, just think of the last time you tried to issue voice commands to an automated system over the phone (we all know how well those work). In a very basic sense, HCI simply seeks to relieve us of frustrations involved with this kind of interaction by making our increasingly necessary relationships with computers as painless and intuitive as possible.

There are several approaches that an HCI expert might use to make interactions with computers easier. Perhaps the most obvious method is to invest time in finding better ways for us to communicate with computers. This can mean either using existing input devices (such as mice and keyboards) in innovative ways, or designing entirely new devices. The big idea in the design of such devices is to try and map gestures that feel natural for humans to something that computers can easily understand, thereby reducing the amount of interpretation errors on the part of computers. A great example of this is the “multi-touch” technology that Apple is using in products such as the iPhone and their range of MacBooks — Apple designers have managed to come up with several touch-pad gestures that map intuitively to various functions performed by the computer (pinching to re-size, swiping to scroll, etc.).

Another important avenue that is commonly explored in HCI is improving the manner in which computers communicate information to users. This involves designing user interfaces in such a way that the displayed information is as clear and concise as possible. The idea behind this approach is similar to the previous one, except that the concern here is to minimize the human’s misinterpretation of data (as opposed to the computer’s).

As you may have guessed, HCI is a fast-paced and competitive field that is continuously evolving. It is therefore necessary for researchers in this field to be constantly pushing the limits of current technology in order to stay ahead of the curve. The HCI lab here on campus is no different; the lab members are working on some rather impressive projects that could very well have an impact on the future standards of human-computer interaction. I’ve already alluded to one of these projects — the design of interactive-surface technology that can be used to collaboratively compose music in an entirely new way (potentially on your future coffee table). Other projects currently in the works include: further development of multi-touch tabletop surfaces, development of a software interface for manipulating objects in 3D space with a motion-sensing pen, and the investigation of novel ways of compressing video feeds using edge-detection technology. These are just some examples of the high-tech research currently going on in the HCI department. If you are interested in learning more about the HCI lab and what they are currently working on, you can visit their homepage at Hci.cs.umanitoba.ca.

Now that you know what the HCI discipline is all about, hopefully this new-found knowledge will provide you with an appreciation for what experts in the field are hoping to accomplish. I hope it hasn’t also made you too impatient as you wait for your musical coffee table to become a reality!