Mutitouch?


It's a forum! What do you expect! A sad truth. I wouldn't bother coming here if it wasn't for some burning need for any or all information related to the Pandora. Oh and boredom.
 
So much anger about someone trying to push the boundaries of what is accepted behaviour for a touchscreen. Strange attitude.

Anyway, does anyone know which touchscreen controller is being used for the Pandora? If you read the thread which was originally linked you'll see that the hw+driver in question can return both a (single) coordinate pair (x,y) and pressure and size of the contact (this last one being the important one).

Therefore it would be able to detect things like moving fingers closer together/further apart (area changes). It may also, depending on how the area is calculated, be able to differentiate between the touch area in both the x and y directions, which would allow some form of 2 finger rotation to be detected (area increases on one axis while shrinking on the other). It depends on how the area is calculated though. Does anyone know off the top of their head?

/me goes off to look at the driver source

lcuk's implementation is slightly different, in that it requires that the fingers touch at different times to be able to tell that there is more than one there (due to the driver we use not returning an area, just location and pressure). Still it's an interesting way to implement pseudo-multitouch, and good luck to him.
 
WoD said:
It's a forum! What do you expect! A sad truth. I wouldn't bother coming here if it wasn't for some burning need for any or all information related to the Pandora. Oh and boredom.
Ok now directly at you... no shit Sherlock...
 
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lardman said:
So much anger about someone trying to push the boundaries of what is accepted behaviour for a touchscreen. Strange attitude.

Not really. Multi touch design and single touch design are two different branches of UI. If someone says "can we have multi touch?" it's an implicit statement that multi touch is superior to single touch. There is no problem solved by multi touch that can't also be solved in single touch, and, with a well designed UI, be just as seamless as Apple has developed on the iPhone.
That's where the negativity is coming from. The single touch group are fixed in the belief that you only need single touch, and they're right. The multi touch group is fixed in the belief that if you have multi touch, it should be used, and they're also right. In a single touch environment, an excellent UI can be developed that uses just single touch in a beautiful and intuitive way. In a multi touch environment, the same is true but with multi touch.
The imperfect multi touch simulation hack makes the following statement, whether it was intended or not: single touch UI is bad enough that we prefer to use an imperfect hack to simulate a highly restrictive multi touch environment. This, of course, gets right up in the face of proponents of single touch interfaces, and is a proverbial slap against those actually working to develop such a single touch interface.
 
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WizardStan said:
Not really. Multi touch design and single touch design are two different branches of UI. If someone says "can we have multi touch?" it's an implicit statement that multi touch is superior to single touch. There is no problem solved by multi touch that can't also be solved in single touch, and, with a well designed UI, be just as seamless as Apple has developed on the iPhone.
I'll go one step further and point out that if this hack was implemented, you could get he same result by taping the "stationary" spot, then pressing and holding on the spot where the input would register in a "multi" situation and moving the stylus. The touchscreen registers the exact same input and the driver behaves the same whether you use two fingers or one. Clearly, this is not of legitimate usefulness.

The main reason I don't want people going on and on about how the Pandora can do multitouch is because it can't. If people keep insisting it can, eventually it's going to end up in yet another poorly researched blog post somewhere and I'll get emails about it. I already get about half a dozen emails a day about the Pandora, and an alarming number of them are along the lines of "I hear the Pandora can play N64 games. Where can I buy one?" We need to keep the level of misinformation to a minimum.
 
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The Pandora plays N64 games through the touch screen! WOOO.

Awesome news Chip!
 
Chip said:
the Pandora can play N64 games.

Good to hear! Awesome!

on topic, why call it multitouch? it clearly isn't, its just a type of UI and I've seen similar things implemented before and not called multitouch.
 
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QUOTE
I'll go one step further and point out that if this hack was implemented, you could get he same result by taping the "stationary" spot, then pressing and holding on the spot where the input would register in a "multi" situation and moving the stylus. The touchscreen registers the exact same input and the driver behaves the same whether you use two fingers or one. Clearly, this is not of legitimate usefulness.


Well I disagree with your legitimacy comment and will explain why.

From what you describe above: tap and hold somewhere, touch screen will register that position, then tap somewhere else, touch screen will register the average position between the two, then drag one of the taps elsewhere and the average position will move. Is this that you're saying? It's certainly true, but the point of the Android hack was that the driver can also return the "area" of the "tap" and this is what allows one to know if it's a fake-multi-touch (large area) or a single touch (small area). Without this info you just can't tell unless you do something like lcuk does and assume a maximum speed above which tap positions can't move, and therefore say it must be a second tap.

With the driver returning the area, it would be possible to move your fingers apart/together and have software reliably differentiate between that two finger gesture and you simply holding one finger on the screen.

So yes, it's not multi-touch in the way we accept it from using an iPod, but if the method works, it could produce some reliable multitouch behaviour.


So on to the UI people: I don't care either way, whether one's designing a multi-touch or single touch UI (except that resistive screens are far more accurate, so realistically I'm only going to use on of those, so it will be a single touch UI that I use). My interest is just that it's cool to be able to add an extra feature/hack (assuming it works or could be made to work, etc.).


QUOTE
The main reason I don't want people going on and on about how the Pandora can do multitouch is because it can't.


Ok for the don't-read-all-of-the-thread misinformation-blog writing people out there then:

The Pandora can't do real multitouch like an iPod, because it has a resistive touchscreen. We're talking about a bit of driver trickery which might possibly allow one kind of multi-touch gesture to be detected. So don't go talking about this anywhere else, or else!
 
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