Hasta La Ideas

How do you post a YouTube video that gets nearly five million hits in 24 hours? Simple: Record a touchscreen voting machine in Pennsylvania that apparently wants to choose your candidate for you.

The Pennsylvania man who posted this video claimed that try as he might, every time he tapped Obama, it selected Romney instead:

Thinking the calibration was off, he then tapped the option below Obama, hoping that would activate his choice. It didn’t.

I initially selected Obama but Romney was highlighted. I assumed it was being picky so I deselected Romney and tried Obama again, this time more carefully, and still got Romney. Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney’s name and started tapping very closely together to find the ‘active areas’. From the top of Romney’s button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama’s name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein’s button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.

I asked the voters on either side of me if they had any problems and they reported they did not. I then called over a volunteer to have a look at it. She him hawed for a bit then calmly said “It’s nothing to worry about, everything will be OK.” and went back to what she was doing. I then recorded this video.

Faulty touchscreen, fat fingers, or something more menacing? If it was the latter, it didn’t work: Obama had Pennsylvania’s 21 electoral votes in his pocket by election’s end.

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Back when I was a bona fide CAD monkey, I had carpal tunnel like the rest of us. After successfully convincing my employer that they needed to ditch the mice and get Wacom tablets, the wrist pain went away.

For intensive work, the pen is such a superior form factor to the mouse that Swedish company Penclic melded the two to create a new type of input device. It looks a little strange—something like a pen sitting in an inkwell—but that hasn’t stopped it from being nominated for “Best Work Environment Product” by the Swedish award of the same name. “The nomination…presents an excellent opportunity to increase awareness about our device’s many advantages over the traditional mouse, both ergonomically and precision-wise,” said Penclic CEO Stina Wahlqvist.

The Penclic mouse’s ergonomic benefits are achieved by eliminating the need for the unnatural, twirling arm movements associated with traditional mice. The pen-shaped design extends the body’s natural movements, allowing the user to work with the underarm kept linear, in a rested, flat position against the work surface.

But the advantages go beyond ergonomics. The device not only looks, feels and moves like a pen, but it also has a pen-like grip that provides a level of precision that makes it well-suited for demanding creative tasks such as photography, design and architecture. Advanced technology in combination with the ergonomic design delivers fast and precise cursor movements with minimal effort and hand motion.

The scroll wheel placement doesn’t seem ideal—as you can see in the vid, when she uses the wheel, the base moves around a bit, which I can see causing havoc with fine-point navigation—but I’m still looking forward to trying one of these out.

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When we first saw the Leap gesture control interface for the Mac, we were blown away. Earlier than that, gamers and hackers were taken by the Wii and the Kinect. Now a new group of creators is working on the latest in gesture-control interfaces, which ought to have an advantage over the current competition: It’s software-based and requires no separate pieces of hardware, instead relying on the cameras now built into virtually every computer, tablet and smartphone.

PredictGaze is the brainchild of Aakash Jain, Abhilekh Agarwal, and Saurav Kumar, three computer scientists and friends based in California. Using a series of algorithms, their software analyzes images captured from your device’s camera—even in low light and near darkness, conditions that have stymied their competition—to deliver useful results. Face recognition, gesture control and eye-tracking are all things we’ve heard of before, but PredictGaze is wrapping it all into a single package, and making it scaleable as per the device it’s installed in.

Their system holds rich promise: Imagine being able to sit in front of your computer, or hold up your phone, and it knows its you through facial recognition, so unlocks itself with no need for a password. Or watching your television, and when you get up to go to the bathroom, it pauses; it resumes play when you’ve sat back down. Or being able to silence the audio by bringing your finger to your lips. And the eye-tracking-controlled browsing, while still a bit clunky looking in their demo, will be a godsend for paraplegics once it’s perfected.

Here are a few videos to give you an idea of what PredictGaze is currently capable of. In this first one, “Gaze Enabled Browser Demo,” you don’t need to watch more than 10 seconds of it to “get it.” (The remainder of the two-minute video has the test subject perform the same up-down scrolling while they gradually dim the lights.)

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From an interface perspective, the analog-to-digital evolution I’ve had the hardest time adjusting to is touchscreens replacing buttons. I used to be so fast at banging out texts on my old Motorola, and the perfectly-calibrated click of each button provided tactile satisfaction. In contrast, I’ve been a daily iPhone user since 2007 and still make errors literally every time I type. It’s maddening, but a trade-off I live with because there’s so many other things I love about the phone.

If a company called Tactus Technology sees uptake, perhaps I’ll be able to have my cake and eat it too. Tactus has developed a new touchscreen where buttons can physically morph up out of what seems like flat glass, then disappear when not needed. They manage the trick by incorporating tiny channels within the substrate, through which a liquid is pumped into button-shaped chambers, providing volume on demand.

The demonstration video doesn’t provide as clear a view as we’d like, and the opening voiceover sounds like something James Lipton wrote, but it should give you the idea of what they’re going for:

Tactus Technology Introduction from Tactus Technology Inc. on Vimeo.

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Paris-based service design company User Studio recently shared a concept for the seemingly impossibly task of designing a beautiful and useful phone bill, the Refact.

After analyzing 18 months worth of phone bill data, the designers worked to cull information that users would actually want to know including total phone usage, number of calls, most called numbers and longest calls. What sets Refact apart from other data visualization options is the online service concept that allows users to easily input the data from their standard-issue phone bill, interact with the resulting information and track usage trends over time. As Matthieu Savary, co-founder of User Studio explains:

There are a lot of situations where we, the users of digital services, find ourselves in front of endless lists of numbers, arrays of meaningless data… especially when it’s time to pay for something! At User Studio, as typical users of a lot of these modern services, we find these situations highly frustrating, especially when we know that the service providers probably use this data—that we, as users, helped produce—to better sell their products.

So we set off to try and find a way to dig up the data that lies in the bills of one of those services that we use all the time: our mobile phone subscriptions. We knew no public API existed… but we had hope that data could be extracted from the PDF bills that the providers are now making available on web platforms (to avoid sending invoices via snail mail).

Phone bills are often considered by mobile operators as something they legally have to provide their customers with. Bills are rarely thought of as a potential part of a much larger and much more compelling user experience (ie. they’re rarely designed with the same care as the provider’s web site, store, customized phone os, in-house apps, etc.)

Refact (EN) from User Studio on Vimeo.

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