Shortly after the dawn of time, after mankind first discovered basic tools and how to apply them, the process of innovation has rolled onwards, not just to improve the tools and the machines made out of them, but to improve how we interact with those tools.
The earliest tools, crude flint stones being used to cut, were hard to hold and cut the fingers – and were attached to sticks to form knives and later axes – there’s probably the first of what we could now call the Human/Machine Interface evolution… and I think another’s coming.
We have thousands of years of human/machine interfacing evolution behind us. From the very simplest stones, through flint stone evolving into flint knives, through the through the bronze and iron ages, and into the current climate, we find ourselves taking the tools we have and making better tools with them.
Each generation, we create better, more precise, or more powerful, or more capable tools – and no small part of that is the fact that we also refine how we use them, how we interact with them. And I firmly believe we stand on the threshold of a revolution in how we interact with our machines.
Last year, Apple introduced their iPad device; a device that is comfortably sized to sit and use as a form of electronic book, portable video player, Internet browser and even for creating content on. While the iPad clearly reused and refined Apple’s existing technology for touch screens and so on, Apple saw fit to label it ‘magical and revolutionary’ on its debut.
With the recent launch of the iPad 2, the same phrase has come back, though there’s not a great deal of revolution in the second incarnation. There is, naturally, a refinement of the technology, innovation upon innovation to pack more power into a smaller space and weight, but nothing that could be badged as revolutionary.
Then it struck me: Jobs is far more astute than the tech press gave him credit for when he brought the iPad to life.
In the talk of the iPad 2, he mentions the ‘post-PC landscape’, he’s envisaging a time beyond the classical computer. Some colleagues of mine have speculated that he is hyping up what is really the post-keyboard landscape, having successfully proved that a keyboard and mouse isn’t necessarily the ideal interface for a device.
I think it’s more than that though. I can do the vast bulk of what I do online without either a full keyboard or a mouse – the tools of the iPad are more than adequate for browsing, for video watching. It’s only large scale content creation that I can’t yet do on the iPad, such as writing this blog; well, I can do it on the iPad already, but it would be far less efficient than typing on a full size keyboard – but again, there’s the decades of keyboard use and mentality catching up with us.
Yes, I think we’re at the brink of moving beyond the keyboard landscape to something else, but I think with that is coming the notion of moving beyond the classical desktop/PC scenario too; that we’re looking to make more use of ‘the cloud’, so physical location becomes less and less relevant, that we’re looking to become freed from desks and offices and do our business on the move.
All this, because our interfaces become more powerful, more portable, and that we can do far more ‘out and about’ than we could even a decade ago – imagine showing an iPad to a computer user of a decade ago and telling them it does full motion video, high speed internet access without any wires and has up to 10 hours battery life, and you’ll get looks of astonishment.
Not just because of the technical accomplishments, but because the interface between human and machine has come much further in that time – the iPad would not look out of place in Star Trek, it looks and feels much like the sorts of console device that the crews of 24th Century starships were using. I’m not sure if that’s life imitating art, but it certainly indicates that we feel more comfortable interacting with a machine without clumsy tools of keyboard and mouse.
Part of the debut of the iPad 2 seemed geared towards the tools to come for the new device, such as bringing GarageBand to the portable platform. This intrigues me, because it’s taking something traditionally manipulated with keyboard and mouse, and putting it literally at your fingertips.
And so, I’m left wondering how long it will be before we evolve beyond mice and keyboards, and onto something more natural, more personal and responsive. Touch screen’s a start, but it’s just the start – we stand on the edge of not just innovation but the next iteration of the information revolution, and it will change everything. Again.
I’m still for the mouse and keyboard.
I can’t draw, at all, in RL and on a tablet. With a mouse though, I’m much better.
A keyboard just *works*. I don’t know how you can ever type on a virtual keyboard. There’s no ‘guide dots’ to say where you are, and the size and style of input can vary from app to app, and from device to device. A keyboard just *is* (super ergonomic and Dvorak aside).
Don’t mention Speech-to-Text either. While it’s improving, it still doesn’t address the base problem, which is – you don’t want to *have* to talk your through everything, especially not in a public place.
As for Star Trek, the hand held devices performed “a variety of functions including logging manifests, compiling duty rosters or diagnostic reports, entering personal data, and/or accessing library computer systems. ” but nothing actually vital. When the time came to get some real work done – they sat down at an actual console. Engineering, helm, environmental controls, weapons (etc etc..)
Well, mouse and keyboard certainly have a place at the moment; they’ve been the primary input methods for decades. And there’s a reason for it: they work, and work rather well for standard things.
Drawing is one of those odd things, but I think that to a large degree it’s about experience and comfort; using a mouse to drive a cursor is not naturally intuitive, which is why you get all the (can’t all be false!) urban legends about people using them as foot pedals and holding them up to the screen and so on.
I suspect if you spent as much time with a pen on paper or stylus on tablet as you have with a mouse, you’d be as comfortable with it, or at least no worse than using a mouse; the ability to sketch and so on is somewhat intuition but also somewhat acquired – using a mouse is far more in the ‘acquired’ bracket.
Virtual keyboard isn’t really a problem, I’m almost as fast on an iPad as on a real keyboard, provided I’m set up right (balancing it across the legs at the right angle, so I can safely get up speed with both hands) – but it’s not a device for hardcore typing like I do
The lack of guide dots isn’t something I’d noticed, and having switched between all kinds of keyboards over the years, it’s just something different to get used to.
The super ergonomic keyboard type, as well as Dvorak, AZERTY and all the other kinds of variations out there, to me they’re slightly symptomatic of the fact that none of the designs are optimal. The nearest I ever saw that was ‘optimal’ in that respect was the Optimus keyboard, with mechanical switch keys (so they have a physical travel and response) but have totally reprogrammable keys – down to the image on the keycap. But even that wasn’t ideal, really.
In fact, that’s something that intrigued me about the iPad; the keyboard layout you get varies depending on what you’re doing; the symbols and keys presented when in Safari, typing in a URL, are different to that for typing in normal text. You get a ‘.com’ button, and things like : and / are first level keys – but normally, : and / are second level.
Speech analysis is still a black art, though it’s come on a long way since I first tried it out a decade ago. It’s still not precise enough for broad accents, for example.
As for Star Trek, yes, I’m not arguing that the handheld stuff wasn’t used for serious jobs, but the form factor doesn’t encourage it to be anyway. Notice though, that the panels they did use at (Next Generation!) consoles were smooth and flat, though, and touch sensitive – much like a bigger form of iPad – and the display varied depending on context, too.
The idea is that it’s easily as responsive as a regular keyboard/mouse, and in some cases, better suited. But even in the 24th Century, they still had conventional books…
I don’t think we’re done with keyboard/mouse yet, but I think the trend over the next 5 years or so will be to adopt touch screens as they improve and evolve, to the point where keyboard/mouse will be virtually ‘classic’, or for specialised tasks.
5 years ago I never would have thought Apple would come out with an entirely new, market defining tablet computing platform. 10 years ago I would have told you no way, it’ll never happen, Microsoft has tried and failed at it why would Apple try it?
Now, I’m not willing to make any bets as to what’s going to happen 5 years from now, but I do think the Human Computer Interface is changing, and rapidly. I don’t think the traditional Keyboard and Mouse will be out, but I do think that for the vast majority of users it will be optional instead of required.
Voice control/recognition/etc. has been the holy grail of computing for some time, it is by far the most natural method of communication we have, but it’s almost 100% limited to human to human communication, not human to computer communication. Right now I don’t think people tend to communicate “to” their computers, they communicate through or with them, as one would any other communication tool. However, I think as computers do become more personal (I consider the iPad to be one of the most personal computers there are, the user is more connected to it than a typical desktop or laptop), then it will become more natural for us to be communicating to our computers and not just through and for this, voice communication will be the most efficient method. As Arantor mentioned above, there are significant hurdles to get over, but I do believe that as computing power becomes ever greater and the computers themselves become ever more personal, it will be a necessity in order to move to the next phase of computing evolution, or perhaps the next next phase.