Term Paper

Touching Technology

Technology has become a key facet of modern living. It is now available in a variety of ways for our entertainment and information-based endeavors. With the exponential growth and evolution of technology, new and exciting forms of digital interaction are emerging. Today, keyboards and mice are becoming replaced by more streamlined user-to-digital interfaces such as touchscreens. Just the same, technology is becoming sophisticated enough that it can relay physical information back to the user. But where is this all leading? The multitude of science fiction stories that have propagated our culture over the past few decades tell of the possibilities, as well as warn of the dangers, of advanced, sentient technology. And with the current path the digital world is following, many of these ideas are quickly coming to fruition.
Technology has long been appealing to our visual and auditory senses. Recently though, it has been forging a path to interacting with our sense of touch. Touchscreen technology is a relatively new and popular medium in the technical world, and it creates a new physical user experience during their interactions. There are a number of different types of touchscreens. Resistive utilizes multiple layers of gapped metal. When something, or someone comes into contact with the surface layer, the layers below it register the contact, and react accordingly. Surface Acoustic Wave, or SAW, utilizes sound waves to detect user contact on the screen. Although vastly more expensive, infrared technology has also been developed into the touchscreen field. The screen utilizes infrared light emitting diodes and photosensors to detect the exact location of the user’s touch . With the advent of the touchscreen cell phone (iPhone, Blackberry) came the exponential popularity of the capacitive touchscreen. This variant constantly generates an electric current over the screen’s surface. Although highly sensitive, the only thing that the current detects is the electric output of a human being. Not even a stylus is registered by capacitive touchscreens. This ensures that only a human may interact with this particular screen.
Touchscreen technology become widely popular during the latter half of the 20th century, and is becoming more commonplace all the time. Seen mostly at mall kiosks, touchscreens serve as both an informational display and a user interface to access, and give information. Appealing to the inherent human impulse of touch, people are almost instinctively drawn to touchscreens. Their flashing lights, their animated displays, and the promise of an intimate, tactile interaction with technology is incredibly appealing in this technological age. “As humans we are very tactile individuals, touch is our primary sense as we navigate the world” states Johnny Lee who is a researcher at Microsoft’s Applied Sciences Group.
As attractive as touchscreens are, they are somewhat limited in their practical application to everyday life. “Touchscreens don’t allow us to use [our sense of touch]” Lee says in reference to touchscreen’s flat and synthetic-feeling nature. Although they provide a wide variety of informational displays, touchscreens do not allow the low-attention and vision-free interactions provided by physical buttons. Although static in the types of interfaces they can support, most people are more comfortable with this style of user-to-digital interface. Conversely, touchscreens have conceivably limitless potential as to where users can interface with technology, but provide no physical feedback. Steps are currently being taken to bridge this gap. C. Harrison and S. Hudson, two doctoral students at the Carnegie Mellon University, have developed a screen that serves three main functions: pop-up buttons and keypads can appear and disappear, a tactile input user interface and a screen that renders graphics and animations. This screen utilizes multiple metallic layers, air pumps and a latex film to provide a shifting touchscreen display. The semi-opaque surface of the latex film serves as the display screen while incorporating diffused illumination-based multi-touch sensing as well as air-pressure sensors to detect the user’s touch location and press force .
While great strides are being made so humans may better touch technology, progress just as great is being made so technology may touch us. Haptic technology is an interface where the digital world can interact with our physical senses. By incorporating vibrations, forces and/or movement, haptic gives technology the ability to interact with us, instead of just the other way around. Haptic first emerged in flight-test simulators for training fighter and commercial pilots, and is meant to replicate the vibrations felt in the controls during actual flight, landing and emergency situations. It has since moved into public use, and has created a sense of touch to, and from the digital world. Force feedback is the most common and well-known form of haptic technology. It uses vibrations to relay information to the user and has been incorporated in an exponentially growing number of gadgets. One of the first public emergences of force feedback was the Nintendo 64’s Rumble Pack attachment for its game controller. This gave physical feedback to the user whenever an appropriate event triggered it such, as their on-screen character delivering or receiving damage, revving the engine, or falling from a certain height, adding to the immersion of the gaming experience. Now, having a vibration feature in modern technology is almost as common as having a screen. Point in case: cellular phones. Vibration has become an essential part of the cell phone’s design, as it is the main function while the phone is set to its “silent” setting.
Today, haptic technology has evolved beyond a simple vibration function. The Novint Falcon controller is one of the most, if not the absolute most, paramount example of the current level of haptic interfacing. Utilizing pneumatic arms and pressure feedback, the Falcon delivers a realistic sense of weight, force, surface texture, and even depth and distance . This controller gives the digital world a truly 3-dimentional perspective. While still a glorified joystick at heart, the Falcon is perfectly suited to be used in a variety of programs such as 3-D digital sculpting and digital painting, while still keeping true to its gaming nature. It is the premier computer peripheral.
While we have become able to physically touch technology and it has been able to respond in kind, there is another, more sensitive input people have been feeding the digital world: personal information. More than just phone numbers, credit cards and addresses, people have been willingly (if not zealously) divulging private information to social networking websites. With the advent of the Internet’s social scene, sites such as Myspace.com, Facebook.com, and most pertinently, Twitter.com have become vast digital repositories of information where users voluntarily input their interests, daily activities, current location, mood, current music track, etc. While this gives the user the illusion of individuality and a spotlight in the stage of the World Wide Web, they are, in fact, deliberately giving away their privacy. Although the Internet does provide a certain level of anonymity, the digital world can still easily track a particular user. Websites such as ZabaSearch.com and NetTrace.com compile a user’s personal information and delivers it to a paying customer. Email addresses and general location of a person can be found by most curious parties, but websites such as PeopleLookUp.com can provide addresses, phone numbers, net handles, relatives and alternate email accounts for as low as $2 to $10 per user. Even if a user of one of the many social network sites deletes their personal information or cancels their account, the website keeps the information in its databanks. Regardless of the required reading of the privacy statement before the sign-up registration is complete for any social site, most users merely click the “accept” button and do not take the time to read it. The statement could claim in plain words “we will sell your information to the highest bidder” and many users would never know. User’s aversion to putting forth effort to make sure their information is secure at the expense of digital social interaction is a frightening notion. Their obliviousness and/or negligence to know
who, or what, knows their personal data should be a worrying to these users, but most just go with the proverbial flow. These sites urge users to constantly update their “current status”, whether it is mood, location or activity, and people enthusiastically comply.
Many science fiction stories describe omniscient machines that can track human’s every movement, but now with Twitter.com, we voluntarily track ourselves in a digital setting. The ability to send a message from one’s cell phone to this site with a small update of where one is, what one is doing and how one is feeling eliminates the need for this all-knowing spying computer. The appeal of this site comes from the attention-needy facet of human nature. Twitter.com allows a person to become the star of his or her own online story. Many celebrities and even politicians including President Obama have accounts on Twitter.com, allowing their fans and followers to digitally see wherever they go, what kind of sandwich they just ate and where, or how hard it is to be a new mother. It truly is a new breed of social networking that connects users on a more personal, and private, level. While enjoyable to many, it is also dangerous. Sites such as Twitter.com make stalker’s jobs all the more easier. Furthermore, the site’s administrative account has already been hacked on at least two accounts, with the most recent one threatening to divulge personal information to the public from high-level profiles information such as Ashton Kutcher’s, Britney Spears’ and even the President’s accounts .
As mentioned before, many science fiction stories warn of the dangers of advanced technology. Novels such as Isaac Asimov’s The Robot Series and films including The Matrix and The Terminator, while highly entertaining, serve as cautionary tales against the encroaching digital revolution. Many elements seen in these works of fiction are becoming rapidly apparent today. Touchscreen technology may someday be everywhere without our knowledge; walls with capacitive electric fields flowing over them waiting to be touched by human hands so it can relay the information of a person’s BTU’s, heart rate and their specific location to the advanced version of Twitter.com. SAW technology could easily track us by one day having a high sensitivity to motion, speech or even a simple heartbeat. Or, perhaps more realistically, cell phone companies could place a tracking chip inside each phone, creating an effective link between personal information and exact location.
With technology being able to track us, or rather we tracking ourselves for it, and having access to our personal information, it is not difficult to conceive that machines may one day know us better than our closest friends and family. With technology becoming more and more automated and self-reliant, James Cameron (co-writer of The Terminator) and Asimov’s visions of sentient machines and their potential to become self-aware is looming dangerously close. Even if we never see cyborgs walking down the street or holding a machine gun, technology and humans are and will be able to interact with one another on mutually physical ways. Haptic and touchscreens are only the beginning.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen

“Experimental Touchscreen has Physical Buttons that can Pop Up, Disappear” Wired Magazine, Ganapati, Priya, May 13, 2009

http://www.chrisharrison.net/projects/pneumaticdisplays/

http://home.novint.com/products/novint_falcon.php

“Twitter Breached Again” www.wired.com Zetter, Kim, May 1, 2009
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/05/twitter-breached-again/

Visuals

I have made considerable progress since the last update.

As with most of my art projects, I dream big and then compromise afterwards. I've had to widdle down my project mock-up to something a bit more simple. At this point, obtaining the three specific types of drums isn't exactly manageable. Fortunately, I managed to get my hands on a set of bongos. These should be more than enough to generate the kind of sounds I need to trigger the animations. Instead of touch screens mounted on the walls, I have settled for projectors displaying the animations from Max/Jitter. Although not exactly the same idea, the sound made by the drums does still act as a trigger for the program.


Recently I discussed my idea with a fellow CIA student with prior knowledge of Max/Jitter. He has agreed to help me with the programming part of my project. He said that the animation and trigger should be pretty simple to program, and he has been keeping in touch with me on his progress.

As happy as I am at my progress and the fact that my project is quickly becoming a reality, I still hope to have my original idea fully realized. I've been reading into the inner workings of touchscreen technology and unusual user interfaces. The different kinds of touchscreens lend themselves to a variety of interfaces. Some rely on a person's electrical charge to indicate what information to display while others rely on interruptions in the constant sonic waves they generate.

I still plan to create my original idea, but for the time being, the mock-up will do. Bongos, projectors and Max/Jitter are much easier to obtain than a war drum, a Japanese drum, a snare drum and giant touch screens.

To date the only outstanding things in the completion of this mock-up are the finishing stages of the Max/Jitter programming of the animations and the triggers and acquiring the projector.

Sonic Partnership

Surface Acoustic Wave, or SAW, technology uses ultrasonic waves that pass over a touchscreen panel. When the panel is touched, a portion of the wave is absorbed by whatever object or person comes in contact with it. This disruption of the ultrasonic waves registers the position of the touch event and sends this information to the user.

Originally and commonly seen in electronic circuits, Surface Acoustic Waves are used as transformers, oscillators and/or filters. SAW's sensor ranges include all areas of sensing, including chemical, thermal, pressure, thermal, torque and biological. SAW's have become widely popular in the commercial industry, especially in the cell phone business.

This method of touchscreen interface may be very beneficial to my project. Although more research is required before deciding if this is indeed the method I wish to use, I believe the use of the SAW's ultrasonic waves on the touchscreen-walls and sonic vibrations from the drums can be the perfect combination for my project.

Hurdle

So, I've hit a hurdle with my project. As I researched by idea for using bigger version of the iPhone screen for the walls of the drum hallway, I found something that forces me to alter my idea.

The iPhone screens are not mere touchscreens, they utilize technology known as "capacitive" screens, which generate a constant electric current that only interacts with a human's electric field. A stylus pen, a gloved hand or any other object not be recognized by the iPhone screen. This includes sonic vibrations.

This is possibly for the best, because the liquid-crystal screens at the size that I am imagining
are easily $50,000 each, if not more.

Thereby, I have downgraded my idea to a *simple* touchscreen (similar to display screens in stores and computers, etc.) which has had its sensitivity greatly increased to detect the sonic vibrations of the drums.

I have also played with the idea of not just having one long screen per wall, but a series of reasonably-sized flat touchscreens, each of varying size for aesthetic effect. Just an idea.

Update 2

I plan to further my idea of utilizing haptic technology and incorporating an audio element.

My first idea was have a room with three of the walls be large screens with a haptic interface. These haptic screens would be highly sensitive in order to pick up sonic vibrations. Specifically, a user would bring their MP3 player to this installation and plug it into a speaker system. The following vibrations caused by the speakers would trigger the haptic screens on the walls, causing them to show various animated visual displays.

My second incarnation of this idea was to have the animated displays reflect the audio waves visually.

After some thought, I ditched the idea of having the user bring in their own music, and have them create sound at the installation itself. Instead of the speakers and MP3 player dock, I would install three drums: a snare drum (military-esque), a giant Japanese-style verticle drum, and a large leather floor drum (war-drum). The square room is replaced with a long hallway, with haptic screens lining the two longest walls and the ceiling, with the same sensitivity. When triggered by the vibrations of the drums, the screens will display a visual representation of the sonic vibrations caused by the three drums

Ideas

Haptic technology:

The interface between human to digital/electronic mediums through the sense of touch. Much more advanced than pressing buttons or moving a mouse, Haptic technology combines touch, heat and movement as means to convey information between humans and digital devices.

examples:
- iPhone
- Novint Falcon Haptics Controller

Last semester in Steve's class I had an idea of how to combine audio elements with haptic technology. I conceptualized a device where one could manipulate music using their hands. I might like to expand upon this idea, or use it as a jumping-off-point.