Take your hands off, use your brains

Devices of the future will understand speech and gestures

Everything is equipped with touch screens these days: cell phones, electronic readers, ATMs. Sensors are at the heart of most of the latest developments. Scientists studying the interaction of people with technology say that the skill ...

Everything is equipped with touch screens these days: cell phones, electronic readers, ATMs.

Sensors are at the heart of most of the latest developments. Scientists who study the interaction of people with technology say that the skill of using touch displays is acquired much faster and more firmly than other methods of handling technology, because the actions necessary for this are natural, pleasant and do not require intellectual effort.

“Computers of the future can be controlled with simple and natural gestures, and they will guess what you want from them,” predicts Eric Horwitz, one of the leading scientists at Microsoft.

The number of touch devices is growing before our eyes. Sony has released a new generation of reading devices equipped with touch screens. Research in Motion is a BlackBerry smartphone with touchscreens, Amazon.com plans to introduce a new Kindle device with a non-glare touchscreen, and Garmin offers touchscreen GPS navigators. Canon and Panasonic are equipping new models of their cameras and camcorders with touch displays, and ATM maker Diebold says more than half of orders are for models controlled by finger movements on the screen.

Touch displays can be seen everywhere, from bridal salons to liquor stores. They can be found in gyms and hospitals, at air ticket counters and in the cabins of Virgin America airlines.

“Everyone who picks up an e-reader for the first time is sure to touch the screen,” says Steve Haber, president of Sony's e-reader business. “We are going to meet the consumer.”

Sometimes people no longer imagine that the device may not be touch sensitive. “My sister has a BlackBerry phone, and when I needed to make a call from it, I still couldn’t figure out that there was no sense in touching the screen and running my fingers across it,” laughs 40-year-old advertising agency employee Susanna Wijsen, accustomed to the touch screen of her iPhone.

Shumin Jai, an employee of IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, who studies the interaction of people with computers, also drew attention to this phenomenon in his research. “People inevitably start poking at the screen in the hope that the device will somehow react. This behavior is inherent in human nature, says Shumin Jai. “You won’t believe it, but my two-year-old daughter figured out how to operate the iPad, and for this she didn’t need to be taught anything.”

According to Harsh Prahlad, an engineer at the SRI International Research Institute, the triumphal march of touch displays began precisely with Apple products. “Everything needed for this had existed for a long time by that time, but it was in the iPhone that all the technologies first worked in a coordinated and elegant way,” he says.

For those who are used to flipping pages while reading with their hands, the desire to touch the screen of the e-reader is also quite natural. How many Kindle screens were mercilessly littered before their owners realized that in this thing the pages are turned with buttons!

Amazon.com has bought touchscreen startup Touchco, but Amazon.com CEO Jeffrey Bizos says the latest Kindle is too shiny and will need to be redesigned. At the same time, in the latest models of readers from Sony, the displays do not have a top glass layer, which reduces the brightness of glare.

Sony's new e-readers are priced between $179 and $299, more expensive than many competitors, but consumers are willing to pay, according to Steve Haber. What's more, Haber notes that many buyers are willing to pay $100 more for a touchscreen model.

“The future is in devices that will recognize natural human behaviors: touch, gesture and speech,” says Eric Horwitz. “The touchscreen is just a beautiful and visible indicator of the direction in which things are moving.”