Splice Now

Ars technica reported yesterday on a new Apple multi-touch patent, this time for a laptop equipped with a wide touch pad stretching across the bottom of the entire keyboard. I find this particularly tantalizing because most multi-touch implementations are based on the idea that you’d touch the screen itself. That presents some real problems about where you’d want to put the screen. Is it angled like a drafting table? Is it hanging in the air? Either way, you end up with awkward body positions and fatigue and you can’t use a mouse. I expect that we’re going to see some kind of hybrid environment where you’ll use your hands to manipulate some things (like scrolling and scrubbing video or grabbing and moving trim boundaries) and a mouse for more precise control. This filing gives a hint of what such an interface might look like. It’s an incremental change and seems like it might be usable sooner rather than later.

For those of you are wondering where I’ve been this week, I was speaking at the University Film and Video Association Conference at the University of North Texas. Norm Hollyn and I did a “conversation” to kick off the event, focusing mostly on issues of collaboration. Partly because editing software now seems to allow you to be a one-man band, it may be that film students are not always learning the collaborative skills they’ll need on big productions. Of course, collaboration is always, in some way, ineffable — every relationship is different and rules are hard to come by. No editor wants to be a “pair of hands,” as we used to say, but, on the other hand, we rarely have complete control. Finding a happy middle ground is at least half the job, maybe more.

If you’re interested in the history of the personal computer revolution you owe it to yourself to check out the Steve and Bill show from the D5 conference two weeks ago. Gates and Jobs were on stage for a 90-minute interview moderated by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal. You can listen to it or watch it from the iTunes store, see a highlight reel here, or check out a transcript. I listened to the audio yesterday, and though it doesn’t reveal anything radically new, it offers a unique perspective on the way these two leaders think and provides a few tantalizing hints about the future.

Gates referred at least three times to what he calls the “natural interface,” presumably a more general description of multi-touch. He clearly thinks it’s the wave of the future, and given that it’s the basis of the iPhone, so does Jobs.

Here’s a relevant quote:

I think natural user interface is particularly applicable here because the keyboard, you know, we’re sort of warped in that we grew up using the keyboard and so it’s extremely natural to us, but things like–and that’s partly why when we showed the Surface computer, I showed it privately to a bunch of CEOs a couple weeks ago, I was kind of stunned by how blown away they were. But their ease of navigation is just not the same. And when they saw that, the idea that they could organize their photo album, it meant more to them than it did to me.

Bill even talked briefly about editing a movie, a surefire sign that what we do is now totally mainstream.

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Microsoft’s “Surface” technology, announced on Tuesday at the Wall Street Journal’s “D: All Things Digital” conference, is a multi-touch point-of-sale device for stores and casinos — a computerized coffee table that houses a little DLP projector and cameras to sense the positions of your hands. Priced at five to ten thousand bucks, they envision people using it for shopping and photo browsing, but over time, the form factor will evolve and the price will come down. Take a look at these links and tell me that you don’t want something like this for editing.

Popular Mechanics Video
PC World Story
Ars Technica Story
MS Surface Site

Microsoft implies that they invented it, and Apple, using related technology in the iPhone, does, too. But the original ideas came from university labs. I’ve talked about it before, here. Check out this video demo by NYU’s Jeff Han from last year’s TED conference.

Multi-touch offers multiple simultaneous points of interaction with the computer, as opposed to a mouse, which offers only one. And it allows for direct manipulation, where you physically touch the display. You get much more sensory bandwidth to the device, and, as a result, it feels more organic and intuitive. Microsoft’s system can also interact with tagged objects that are placed upon it.

I sure don’t want to edit hunched over a coffee table, but in the right form factor this might really be a slick way to work.

Technorati Tags: media and society