Touchscreens are Obsolete

There has been a fundamental flaw in the whole “smartwatch” fad up to this point…

They haven’t figured out how we’re supposed to interact with the stupid things.

Of the dozen or so models we’ve seen, there hasn’t been a single approach that’s been an obvious winner.

Some of them have touchscreens, but the interaction model is essentially the same tap-and-swipe behavior of smartphones, and the screens are simply too small to accommodate that.

Some of them have buttons and knobs like watches have always had, but these present a similar problem: It’s an interface meant for the way watches used to be — not equipped to handle the new tasks smartwatches can do.

When we cram new functionality into an old form factor, designers have to reinvent the way we interact with them.

What is the best way to make a watch do all the tasks our computers can do?

That question will be answered in 2015.

Please Don’t Touch

Consider for a moment the recent bankruptcy of GT Advanced Technologies (NASDAQ: GTAT), the company responsible for providing sapphire glass to Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL).

Last year, that company signed a $578 million contract to provide super-strong sapphire glass material to Apple for use in some of its devices, presumably as a touchscreen surface and in the touch identification panel of the iPhone.

Unfortunately, the company just couldn’t ramp up its touchscreen materials to meet Apple’s demand. Subsequently, it must undergo Chapter 11 restructuring.

Apple’s demand for a super-strong touch-friendly material effectively put the company into bankruptcy.

But what if we didn’t have to touch our phones so damn much? Device manufacturers could make super-strong screens that didn’t also have to be touch-friendly.

Even though they spent years trying to get every person on the planet to walk around with touchscreen devices in their pockets, the biggest consumer tech brands in the world have spent just as much time trying to find a way to get us to stop touching them.

Researchers have been hard at work devising touchless systems that allow us to interact with the virtual world simply by waving our hands around in thin air.

It’s been a long time coming, but these systems will begin to turn up in consumer smartphones as early as next year.

Since 2008, Palo Alto-based Elliptic Labs has been showing off various iterations of its touchless user interface. At the CEATEC conference in Tokyo this week, Elliptic is making the bold claim that smartphones with thin-air gesture recognition will begin rolling out in 2015.

The company is showing off some new features that will be available in these new devices, such as screens that react and change based upon how close your hand is. If you’re watching a YouTube video, for example, the pause/play/scrub overlay appears if you raise your hand toward the screen.

This type of interaction falls under the category of natural user interfaces (NUI), a somewhat stale term describing human interactions with machines in which the user doesn’t have to learn some new interface.

Instead, a person’s natural behavior is used as a simple interaction with the machine.

NUIs

The first large-scale touchless NUI was made by Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) with its Xbox 360 Kinect peripheral. With stereoscopic cameras, the video game console was able to “see” the user’s gestures, and with onboard microphones and speech recognition software, it was able to “hear” the user’s voice commands.

Thanks to the runaway success of the Xbox 360, Microsoft helped propel natural user interfaces into the next generation and has sunk a considerable amount of research into developing them further with its current generation of video game console, the Xbox One.

Already this month, Microsoft has unveiled two new pieces of research for touchless interaction that portend more leadership in the space.

The first technology is called “Microsoft Handpose” — a fully articulated hand-tracking technology that requires only a single-depth camera instead of the pair found in Kinect systems. Any hand gesture is instantly recognized and digitized.

The most impressive part of Microsoft’s tech demo is that it works when the camera is moving around, making it ideal for mobile scenarios.

The second technology was developed in conjunction with Swiss university ETH Zurich and uses the standard RGB camera found in nearly every smartphone today to recognize hand gestures in mid-air.

Researchers describe it in the following way:

“While touch input works well for many scenarios, we demonstrate numerous interaction tasks such as mode switches, application and task management, menu selection and certain types of navigation, where such input can be either complemented or better served by in-air gestures. This removes screen real-estate issues on small touchscreens, and allows input to be expanded to the 3D space around the device.”

So far, the algorithm recognizes how far away the hand is from the device, the shape of the hand, and the gesture, and it detects individual fingers. With a phone held in the palm of one hand, the user can tap and swipe with his thumb but perform other gestures in mid-air in front of the camera.

This is especially relevant to smartwatches, which are only now being equipped with their own cameras.

The Samsung Gear 2 has a two-megapixel camera on the top of its bezel aiming outward. This could be employed in a touch-free interface for the device, eliminating the need to consistently tap on the tiny 1.63-inch screen.

This functionality is obviously not present in the device yet, but the way the chips are currently falling, it will be.

The question then becomes: Where should I invest?

I’ll tell you right now, look at user interface patents, and look at companies designing free-space user interfaces. Any brilliant advancement in 3D interface design, no matter how small, is extremely valuable.

Good Investing,

Tim Conneally

 @TimConneally on Twitter

For the last seven years, Tim Conneally has covered the world of mobile and wireless technology, enterprise software, network hardware, and next generation consumer technology. Tim has previously written for long-running software news outlet Betanews and for financial media powerhouse Forbes.