Through the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX)
This holiday season, have time to kill time, look around for a big wallsized multi-
Touch screen in one of the terminals (
I forgot which one)
There are jigsaw puzzles on it (
This is a picture and I can't find one in the public domain).
If you can get through the little kids who usually flock around, just drag the pieces around and play, you can try to solve it.
This shared touch
Screen computing equipment in public places is the future (
If you find other similar examples, send me a picture and I will show it on this blog).
It represents the trend of public computing that I have already written on my blog.
It also marks a related, convergence trend from Reading-
Write Web page to touch-Tinker Web.
This is a visualization of what I think is happening.
Why touch?
Is Tinker Web important?
Because this is the final stage of the tablet revolution.
The latest developments like quantum
The point-based screen display action is heating up.
Let me explain.
The network is really two-Dimensional?
The tablet is a fusion device that affects technological trends in three ways: encouraging device sharing, killing TV, and of course making touch the core of computing. The device-
The sharing aspect is what I said last time (
People seem more willing to share tablets than laptops, and the tablets or walls are clearly larger --
The size of the screen is built to share). The killing-
The TV effect is direct and indirect.
As we get used to watching videos on our tablets, we're more likely to drop cable subscriptions, use devices like Roku, or just a normal computer, and turn the TV into a computer monitor.
I did this recently.
For me, buying the iPad was the starter medication that got me into Roku, Hulu Plus and Netflix and ended up canceling the cable.
As I mentioned last time, today's young children have come to the conclusion that television is a "bad" device because it doesn't react to touch as it used.
In this article, I would like to focus on the most important meaning of the touch replacement mouse: replace read-
Write dynamic with touchDing dynamic.
To figure out why touch has this effect, think about a clearly stupid question: do we use the network through a 2D screen, but is it really 2D? It isn't.
The beginning of the network is a text medium, text-
Reading is fundamentally
Dimension action.
We can skip, skip and scan, but the basic pattern is
Lines from left to right and down (in left-to-
Country of the correct alphabet).
We use the picture as part of the 1D text-
Reading experience.
Or rather, the symbolic part of the user experience is 1D and The Feeling part is 2D (Pictures, videos).
The former dominates the latter.
In addition to the small cottage industry for games and infographics, there is not much symbolic 2D content on the Web (
Here, I use "symbols" to represent the representation of abstract things, not images of physical things).
The rise of video (
Now the largest share of Internet bandwidth usage)
Broke the text.
Some of the experience is dominant, but not entirely.
Before touching, the TV was an excellent 2D experience with not much symbolic 2D content other than the game.
But as the jigsaw puzzle screen at Los Angeles International Airport shows, once you put the touch in the mixture (and de-
Emphasis on keyboard and mouse)
The network becomes the perfect medium for a truly rich 2D experience that combines symbolic and sensory information. Why?
Because we mainly manipulate the 2D symbol information.
That's why the game and infographic with slider or zoom/pan control (
Poor operating ability through the mouse)
Is the first full
2D begins to appear.
Touch, keyboard, open the gate.
Instead of being tied to the mouse or encouraged to use words by the keyboard, we are encouraged to use almost complete tactile operations.
There was only one network before. dimensional.
When the online game appears, it has become 1. 5 dimensional.
Now it's becoming a complete 2D experience (
In my opinion, there are still decades left for 3D: It's not technology;
Human behavior must catch up).
Minority Report world for UI designer world, famous scene in Minority Report, Tom Cruise turns information processing into a 2D puzzle
The tactile way of thinking in the puzzle style is a good start to the conversation.
I 've seen people with user interfaces who think it's their Holy Grail, and some who think it's Hollywood crap, an unnatural way of thinking that real people don't actually use.
I happen to agree with the first camp.
I think this is the holy grail and we are getting closer and closer to it all the time.
What limits us is our attachment to the Internet as a text medium.
Now that attachment is broken.
If you recall the scene, you will remember that Tom Cruise did a lot of manipulation.
This is a very physical scene.
He stood, moving around with energy, scaling, panning, spinning like crazy.
In contrast, when most of us are sitting in the calculation, we mainly use the window function of the computer to switch between text windows.
We don't really like puzzles.
Intuitive Visual Thinking.
You also need to support real minorities in addition to touch --
Obviously, the screen for reporting type thinking is larger (
That's why the tablet is open, not the end)
, Used to standing and moving in calculations (
Wii and Microsoft Kinect got us used to this)
And feel comfortable with the world of 2D thinking tools and patterns.
We are familiar with the classic: Chart, hidden map, mind map
Maps, flow charts, maps and puzzles.
We know how to use the whiteboard. But the touch-
Tinker Web opens up more possibilities.
Let's look into a few examples of tools for you to think about possibilities.
None of them are fully prepared to take advantage of what public contact brings.
But they all pointed out the direction very well. Three Touch-
All 2D symbols for Tinker Web tools-
For a long time, sensory thinking tools fascinated me, so I started with my own horn first.
I worked at Xerox memeat Xerox until February when I led a job creating a 2D thinking tool like Trailmeme (
Think of it as a combination of the mind
Maps and bookmarks).
It doesn't support touch yet, but it allows you to visually organize all the links and relationships between them (
This is a screenshot I did when I was working on the garbage industry. .
When I was doing Trailmeme, I knew Nova Spivack, a serial entrepreneur.
He is always doing interesting things, and his recent adventure is another great 2D thinking tool: Bottle nose.
It brings the metaphor of sonar (
His previous startup was called the radar network, so this is obviously a pet theme for Nova)
And encourage you to wash your digital stream Image (bottlenose)
Dolphins navigate through sonar.
It's still in beta, but you can sign up with the invite codeforbes for a limited amount of time.
This requires some habits, but personally I find that the sonar UI is a very intuitive way to handle my stream.
Pinterest is already quite good.
I know, but I included it because it was the first solid attempt to bring a very familiar 2D tactile experience ---
Use corkboard or post-it notes --to the Web.
I don't think much of it myself, but I know a lot of people do.
2012 challenge: Touch
OK, we all play Angry Birds now, ready to use touch more seriouslytinker Web.
There are equipment and tools.
The biggest problem is touch. tinker content.
As always, content is the last piece of puzzle for any new media, because content creators won't really get the hang of new media until some pioneers show it.
This hasn't really happened yet, but I suspect 2012 is a year of touch content Games
Tinker Web will start taking off.
One thing that is holding back the content game is the lack of a good generic standard format for tactile content, but I bet it will come soon.
If you want to go beyond the curve, start developing modular content that you suspect will match other content in a mix 'n match way.
Among the good candidates, there are content of the flash card type, images of unusual size, interesting geometric data (
As the jigsaw puzzle example shows, people with a large number of such "shards" will be required).
I have some ideas here and I will be introducing them on the blog soon, but none of them are really convincing.
If you can think of a very rich idea, you can touch
Patch the content, drop whatever you are doing and start creating.
10 years ago, you will be as influential as the first bloggers in emerging new media.