Mutitouch?


maybe it makes sense to merge this with the old thread and unlock it... To avoid several threads about the same topic. Unless, of course, the old one became too nonsensical - I didn't check.
 
Karel Jansens said:
It doesn't matter how useful or not multitouch is on resistive screens, the point is that it is possible, contrary to your ex cathedra statement.
Click to expand...
Um. If the point isn't something that's useful, but something that can prove another board member (admittedly a mod in this case) was WRONG, then I can perhaps see why the thread was closed. That might not be seen as an especially positive/helpful contribution (rightly or wrongly).
 
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Karel Jansens said:
Chip said:
"Multitouch" as described in that link is really just a PoC tech demo. It is far less convenient in actual usage than traditional single-point input. Someone could certainly add that functionality to a program, but it would be more for the ability to say "My program has multitouch" than to actually improve the user experience.

Multitouch is a gimmick. It is a useful gimmick for capacitive touchscreens which are not particularly precise, but it doesn't (can't) give you much (any) benefit on a resistive screen. Having the multitouch option on a capacitive display gives you many different options for UI interfaces, which allow you to avoid capacitive's weak points. However having to use two hands would be particularly awkward with the Pandora's clamshell design, even if it was technically possible.

The previous thread was closed because the question had been accurately and completely answered, and the last half dozen posts were completely off topic. Nothing useful can come from leaving a thread open when there is nothing left to discuss but people keep posting asinine comments anyway.


You closed the previous thread with a blanket statement that was wrong, but because you decided to use your moderator powers to close the thread, you made it impossible to reply to that statement. It doesn't matter how useful or not multitouch is on resistive screens, the point is that it is possible, contrary to your ex cathedra statement.

As to the advantage of single-point input, even that is debatable. Apple Newtons have resistive touchscreens, yet the O/S provides a rich set of stylus gestures, none of which are single-point, but all of which enhance the UI.


Way ta' stick it to the man!
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
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Eh, why not just use gestures from the analog pads for input? I don't think I'll be using the single point input too much to begin with, much less trying to hold the thing comfortable and putting two fingers on it. Remember the form-factor of this thing, and that there's going to be a big heavy chunk of plastic hanging off the bottom of the screen. Granted it'd be cool to say that it supports multi-touch, but it wouldn't really be an *honest* description, given the limitations described above.
 
Well, I didn't want to start a big debate with the other thread. i just found the hack and thought I would share it.

Maybe anyone likes to attempot to write a multitouchdriver. Why not? This is an open platform, isn't it?

If it was to any Hardwarelimitation I would agree to shut the thread down, but there is a chance that it would work.

Why put people Windows on their PSPs? With a really slow emulator or something, that works glitchy or stutters like crap????

---- BECAUSE IT CAN BE DONE ----




Edit: spelling
 
Chip said:
However having to use two hands would be particularly awkward with the Pandora's clamshell design, even if it was technically possible.
Click to expand...
Hear hear, I had to re-read that one. People seem to forget that a resistive touch-screen uses a stylus because that's approximately the only way you can get any sort of accuracy or response out of it. Holding two stylii and still holding the Pandora at the same time would require thee hands, basically rendering the whole concept utterly pointless.

Capacitive touch screens may be imprecise but the iPhone isn't half good at working out what it is you're stabbing your finger at. Clicking links in Safari that I can't even see under my finger is pretty nifty.

The greater inherent precision of a resistive touch-screen is pretty essential to the Pandora's flexibility. A port of Ubuntu, for example, is not going to have a finger-friendly UI.

QUOTE
If it was to any Hardwarelimitation I would agree to shut the thread down, but there is a chance that it would work.


There is a hardware limitation. The screen can only register one single touch at any one time, is that limited enough for you? Perhaps someone will toy with this concept and make something useful out of it, but I think everyone has got better things to be doing than implementing pseudo multi-touch on a device that has analogue sticks and a d-pad you could use to scroll/zoom/rotate documents/web pages and more.

Holding the Pandora with one hand, with a thumb on the left analogue stick and working with the stylus in your right hand would be better, no? That thumb can easily pan and scroll, and using the left shoulder button could easily apply a modifier to the analogue control to gain access to even more navigation shortcuts (possibly in a radial menu) such as Forward, Back, Refresh, Stop.

Works the same if you're a leftie (like me) only you use the right analogue rick and shoulder button to gain quick and easy access to a plethora of commands.
 
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I'm thinking it would be cool to use the analogs as two nub mice, and the shoulder buttons as buttons for the two 'mice'.
With a specialized GUI for this kind of input, it could have similar features to the iPhone's scale and rotate functions. [Though I'm not sure how accurate it would be]
Of course, most GUIs are single-touch inherently, and using the touchscreen for even one touch is pretty tricky on a handheld.

In fact, I might have to go try this in SDL now. [tomorrow morning]
 
WoD said:
Chip said:
However having to use two hands would be particularly awkward with the Pandora's clamshell design, even if it was technically possible.
Click to expand...
Hear hear, I had to re-read that one. People seem to forget that a resistive touch-screen uses a stylus because that's approximately the only way you can get any sort of accuracy or response out of it. Holding two stylii and still holding the Pandora at the same time would require thee hands, basically rendering the whole concept utterly pointless.

Again: wrong. The only reason why most resistive touchscreens are best used with styluses, is because of the UI, not of the screen. Most touch UIs for stylus are designed in such a way that a fingertip is simply too big to accurately select UI elements. E.g. the Nokia Internet Tablets had at one time a UI that could detect whether the user touched the screen with a finger or a stylus, and changed the size of UI elements accordingly (granted, Nokia developers apparently weren't skilled enough to maintain this system, so Nokia chose to go finger-only, thereby even further negating your argument).

There are, however resistive touchscreens that specifically need a stylus (or fingernail) to operate (e.g. the Newtons, and several Fujitsu Siemens tablets), but this is a conscious and more expensive design decision, not an innate property of resistive screens.

It is therefore not only possible, but even ridiculously easy to operate a resistive touchscreen with fingertips, provided the UI is taylored to it, and the argument that effective multitouch requires two hands, can only come from someone without thumbs.

QUOTE
Capacitive touch screens may be imprecise but the iPhone isn't half good at working out what it is you're stabbing your finger at. Clicking links in Safari that I can't even see under my finger is pretty nifty.

The greater inherent precision of a resistive touch-screen is pretty essential to the Pandora's flexibility. A port of Ubuntu, for example, is not going to have a finger-friendly UI.

QUOTE
If it was to any Hardwarelimitation I would agree to shut the thread down, but there is a chance that it would work.


There is a hardware limitation. The screen can only register one single touch at any one time, is that limited enough for you? Perhaps someone will toy with this concept and make something useful out of it, but I think everyone has got better things to be doing than implementing pseudo multi-touch on a device that has analogue sticks and a d-pad you could use to scroll/zoom/rotate documents/web pages and more.

Holding the Pandora with one hand, with a thumb on the left analogue stick and working with the stylus in your right hand would be better, no? That thumb can easily pan and scroll, and using the left shoulder button could easily apply a modifier to the analogue control to gain access to even more navigation shortcuts (possibly in a radial menu) such as Forward, Back, Refresh, Stop.

Works the same if you're a leftie (like me) only you use the right analogue rick and shoulder button to gain quick and easy access to a plethora of commands.

It doesn't matter what hardware limitations the screen has: if the software can accurately enough calculate the position of multiple touches from one set of coordinates, it works.

And claiming that you are the authority on what people should focus on, seems a bit presumptuous to me. But then again, maybe you are the God of Pandora, to whom all should harken.
Click to expand...
 
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I didn't claim authority over anything. But you appear to shoot down my much more reasonable use of the prevalent controls on the Pandora in favour of a pointless hack, maybe you're the God Of All Things Pandora.

QUOTE
if the software can accurately enough calculate the position of multiple touches from one set of coordinates, it works.


Nothing can accurately calculate TWO positions from one set of coordinates. The software doesn't even purport to do that. It stores one set of coordinates, the last touched position, and then works out if your subsequent touch is of a significant enough distance and close enough time from the primary one to be a multi-touch and not a deliberate touch elsewhere. It then calculates the distance between this second touch and the saved first touch to approximate a multi-touch gesture. This would sort-of work, although he does harp on about tapping directly into the resistive feedback of the screen to register a point between the two touches.

I'd wager that the system doesn't work so well if you place both fingers on the screen simultaneously as you would with an iPhone, but I could be wrong.

Multi-touch screens can track much more than just two contact points, and do so simultaneously, this trick may be mildly interesting but is just a simple hack to emulate only two contact points with little use on a device that has enough analogue controls and hardware buttons to completely negate the point of having multi-touch in the first place.

If anyone wants to try implementing this multi-touch on the Pandora then go for it. The idea is simple, and the implementation requires only play-school mathematics. Actually polishing it up to a state where it's both usable, useful, comfortable and preferable over the analogue controls (which would be naturally right under your other thumb when holding the Pandora!) would be a challenge.

I'll probably knock up a demo myself, but I don't personally want to see the lovely screen density of the Pandora wasted on hulking great buttons and am not about to produce an entire UI with modified browsers and other applications just to implement a useless feature.

Probably not too hard to hack up the touch-screen driver to convert pseudo multi-touch to scroll-wheel input, though.. that might appease some.
 
Karel Jansens said:
It doesn't matter what hardware limitations the screen has: if the software can accurately enough calculate the position of multiple touches from one set of coordinates, it works.
Click to expand...
Which seems to be the point - because it can't. It remembers one point (let's say "thumb") and calculates the second position (say... "finger") as being twice the distance as the current reported pressure point from that stored position.

Numerous things come to mind, but they start with being "technically, the software cannot and is not calculating the position of multiple touches from one set of co-ordinates". It just isn't.

But what IS it doing, what CAN it do, and is it useful?

Obviously, it doesn't and cannot do what multitouch seems to be largely touted as doing - chording for example, or allowing multiple people to interact simultaneously. It's "simulating" multi-touch only as far as two points, and one of those has to be remembered and unchanging. It reminds me of the whole 2.5D/3D comparison - 2.5D is useful (critical!) but getting hung up on whether it's REALLY 3D or not isn't helpful, IMHO. In much the same way, this appears to be an interesting idea but it isn't ACTUALLY multi-touch. You could even fool it into thinking multi-touch is being used with a single finger, as the hardware is only able to detect one touch at a time. Maybe software would be clever enough to spot what you're doing most of the time, although, but at best it's "touch-and-a-half" simulation/emulation, nothing approaching full "mutli-touch" as far as I can see. IMHO.

It seems to me that the whole discussion is caught in a chronic loop of "it's multi-touch" vs "no, it isn't". I don't know whether that is the intent of the combatants, or whether the terminology is getting in the way of a potentially more interesting/useful discussion of "can we use such gesturing techniques to Pandora's benefit"?

And no - I'm not God either :)
 
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Just to make a few things clear: I have not (and never have) advocated the use of a finger-only UI on the Pandora or on any other handheld. As a matter of fact, I loathe the For-Dummies-Only iPhone (<spit!>) UI and have chastized the Nokia developers for abandoning the stylus-friendly UI style in "favour" of big finger icons, turning Maemo into another White Trailer Trash UI. As a more matter of fact, my favourite tablet of all times is the Newton, which doesn't even recognize finger input (the screen controller is set to ignore touches that encompass too many pressure points).

My point is that the statement that multitouch is impossible on resistive touchscreens, is false, regardless of its actual usefulness. Apparently you're set to turn this into a UI flamewar, which is fine by me, but I won't participate.

For the record, finger-friendly UIs have their place (I'm thinking of media player controls) and so has multitouch (picture viewers and editors) and Nokia's abandoned solution of the UI switching by detecting stylus or finger touch to the screen was simply brilliant in my book (Nokia abandoned it because they deemed it too difficult to maintain and too cumbersome for developers, which means that either Nokia's developers are dumb or they seriously underestimate the Internet Tablets' developer base).

Of course, intelligently implementing touch UI (and more so multitouch or multipoint UI elements) in a device that has several other input devices onboard, is not a simple matter. I would advize any developer to take a close look at Psion's EPOC and more specifically its implementation in the Series 5mx/Series 7/Netbook of portable computers to see how a mix of keyboard and touchscreen UI should be done right.
 
Application: MUSIC MAKING!

Man, can't wait until I can use a multi-touch zynaddsubfx+seq24 rig .. ;)
 
QUOTE
My point is that the statement that multitouch is impossible on resistive touchscreens, is false, regardless of its actual usefulness.


Please for the love of god call it simulated multi-touch or something other than multi-touch. Because it's not multi-touch. And thus saying that the statement is false is in and of itself a false claim.

The statement is, in fact true in context of the perfectly accepted and defined term "multi-touch", the linked page refers to simulated multi-touch and thus for your argument to hold any water you should use the correct terminology. It's not, after all, a small and insignificant difference which you're confusing.

QUOTE

It seems to me that the whole discussion is caught in a chronic loop of "it's multi-touch" vs "no, it isn't". I don't know whether that is the intent of the combatants, or whether the terminology is getting in the way of a potentially more interesting/useful discussion of "can we use such gesturing techniques to Pandora's benefit"?



I second reigning in the topic. Yes this technology could theoretically be used for the benefit of Pandora but implementing it alongside a traditional touch-screen interface could provide unexpected results. We wont know until someone tries and, as I suggested, this sort of pseudo multi-touch simulating code could be implemented at driver level to simulate a mouse-wheel so it's useful to a whole (not necessarily touch-centric) operating system.

Of course, if you implement this finger + thumb requiring technology alongside a typical stylus driven interface you then have the inconvenience of having to hot-switch between finger + thumb and stylus which isn't terrifically comfortable to do for anything this technology could simulate, and is also pointless when there's a far easier-to-access analogue nub just begging to be used.

So, to summarise:

1) Multi-touch is impossible on a resistive screen, but can be simulated approximately in software with as yet unknown results.

2) Using simulated multi-touch on a non-touch UI means sub-optimal switching between stylus and fingers. Seemingly pointless when an analogue nub is available and often right beneath the left thumb. Is there much benefit to simulated multi touch over the analogue stick? It could, perhaps, be faster and more precise for zooming.

3) Implementing simulated multi-touch into a touch centric environment could be practical and comfortable, but would require some amount of testing. I'd certainly like to see it, and maybe even try it.
 
WoD said:
QUOTE
My point is that the statement that multitouch is impossible on resistive touchscreens, is false, regardless of its actual usefulness.
Click to expand...
Please for the love of god call it simulated multi-touch or something other than multi-touch. Because it's not multi-touch. And thus saying that the statement is false is in and of itself a false claim.


Indeed. I have an emulated BBC Micro on my GP2X but I would not dream of saying it IS a BBC Micro computer. It's a simulated or emulated one - and it's extremely good IMHO. I love it, possibly more than the BBC Master 128 that's in my loft, because it's a lot more convenient - but alas the keyboard is nowhere near as good :(

Simulated multi-touch (even only 1.5 touches) sounds interesting and I'm pretty sure that several applications could be found to put it to good use - but it's simulated. By definition it's not REALLY multi-touch.

I'd certainly be interested in seeing such a thing at work - but at the moment I have to strongly agree that theoretical simulated 1.5 multi-touch does not refute actual lack of real multi-touch capability.
 
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Urgh... multi touch is multi touch if more than one touch is used...
Even simulated multi touch is multi touch...

Anyway stop the pedantry and just think how a simulated multi touch may benefit the Pandora.

PS chill out...
 
QUOTE
just think how a simulated multi touch may benefit the Pandora


I did. And posted my thoughts on the topic in respect to different styles of UI, usefulness, comfort etc.

Why does everyone focus on the negative?

I'm not being pedantic. Just precise.
 
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