GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

In London, it’s hard to find a restaurant without a gimmick. And Inamo has probably the biggest gimmick of all. If you’re a hungry, tech-loving nerd, that is.

The restaurant, which just launched a new venue on London’s, tries to do away with almost all waiterly duties, apart from actually carrying plates around. A projector sits above each table and turns the table into a computer-screen (the projector is hooked up to a Windows XP machine). Using a touchpad, you can browse the menu and place your orders, and when you select a dish, a picture of it is projected onto an empty plate already on the table.

Whilst dining, you can choose various “wallpapers” (table-cloths?) to be displayed on the table, and there are even some games, although not any you’d actually play – the folks from UK tech blog Pocket Lint headed over to a pre-launch party and report that one of the games is Battleship. Really?

When you’re done, you can order up the check and call a cab, all from the comfort of your table.

I just hope the bosses at Inamo have some fallback plans. Tech has a way of failing in the catering industry (I was in the game for 15 years), and that’s robust, purpose-built gear. Imagine the poor customer trying to place an order and getting the dreaded Blue Screen of Death. On the other hand, at least a PC can’t come to work drunk.

Inamo hi-tech restaurant hands on [Pocket Lint]
Photos: Paul Lamkin / Pocket Lint

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Apple’s new MacBook Air borrows a lot of things from the iPad, including hyperportability and instant-on flash storage. But the Air won’t use an iPad-like touchscreen. Neither will any of Apple’s laptops. That’s because of what designers call “gorilla arm.”

And while Apple points to its own research on this problem, it’s a widely-recognized issue that touchscreen researchers have known about for decades.

“We’ve done tons of user testing on this,” Steve Jobs said in Wednesday’s press conference, “and it turns out it doesn’t work. Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical. It gives great demo, but after a short period of time you start to fatigue, and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off.”

This why Jobs says Apple’s invested heavily in developing multitouch recognition for its trackpads, both for its laptops, on its current-generation Mighty Mouse and on its new standalone Magic Trackpad.

Avi Greengart of Current Analysis agrees it’s a smart move, borne out of wisdom gathered from watching mobile and desktop users at work.

“Touchscreen on the display is ergonomically terrible for longer interactions,” he says. “So while touchscreens are popular, Apple clearly took what works and is being judicious on how they are taking ideas from the mobile space to the desktop.”

But Apple didn’t have to do its own user testing. They didn’t even have to look at the success or failure of existing touchscreens in the PC marketplace. Researchers have been documenting usability problems with vertical touch surfaces for decades.

“Gorilla arm” is a term engineers coined about thirty years ago to describe what happens when people try to use these interfaces for an extended period of time. It’s the touchscreen equivalent of carpal-tunnel syndrome. According to the New Hacker’s Dictionary, “the arm begins to feel sore, cramped, and oversized the operator looks like a gorilla while using the touch screen and feels like one afterwards.”

According to the NHD, the phenomenon is so well known that it’s become a stock phrase and cautionary tale well beyond touchscreens: “‘Remember the gorilla arm!’ is shorthand for ‘How is this going to fly in real use?’.” You find references to the “gorilla-arm effect” or “gorilla-arm syndrome” again and again in the scholarly literature on UI research and ergonomics, too.

There are other problems with incorporating touch gestures on laptops, regardless of their orientation. Particularly for a laptop as light as the MacBook Air, continually touching and pressing the screen could tip it over, or at least make it wobble. This is one reason I dislike using touchscreen buttons on cameras and camera phones — without a firm grip, you introduce just the right amount of shake to ruin a photo.

Touchscreens work for extended use on tablets, smartphones and some e-readers because you can grip the screen firmly with both hands, and you have the freedom to shift between horizontal, vertical, and diagonal orientations as needed.

On a tablet or smartphone, too, the typing surface and touch surface are almost always on the same plane. Moving back and forth between horizontal typing and vertical multitouch could be as awkward as doing everything on a vertical screen.

This doesn’t mean that anything other than a multitouch trackpad won’t work. As Microsoft Principal Researcher (and multitouch innovator) Bill Buxton says, “Everything is best for something and worst for something else.”

We’ve already seen vertical touchscreens and other interfaces working well when used in short bursts: retail or banking kiosks, digital whiteboards and some technical interfaces. And touchscreen computing is already well-implemented in non-mobile horizontal interfaces, like Microsoft’s Surface. Diagonalized touchscreen surfaces modeled on an architect’s drafting table like Microsoft’s DigiDesk concept are also very promising.

In the near future, we’ll see even more robust implementations of touch and gestural interfaces. But it’s much more complex than just slapping a capacitative touchscreen, however popular they’ve become, into a popular device and hoping that they’ll work together like magic.

Design at this scale, with these stakes, requires close and careful attention to the human body — not just arms, but eyes, hands and posture — and to the context in which devices are used in order to find the best solution in each case.

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After Microsoft’s Surface multitouch table premiered, early implementations were limited: retail stores, hotels, restaurants, bored executives goofing off in board rooms, and university researchers modeling totally kickass Dungeons & Dragons games.

But why waste your time controlling virtual armies of NPC henchmen when you can control REAL armies of tiny robots? Or giant ones? That’s the Doctor Doom move. You don’t even need to peek at your WWDDD? bracelet from inside your hideous metal mask.

Nobody at the UMass-Lowell Robotics Lab (as far as I know) has a hideous metal mask. And they haven’t even built the robots yet — so this is still at the D&D level of virtual awesomeness/villainy, not cartoonish super-villainy.

But there’s important, amazing, yet simple tech at work in this proof-of-concept demo. The researchers use multitouch to send the robots scurrying around to execute commands, but also to pan and zoom a map of where they’re operating, create virtual subcontrollers, and display text and video data, all within the same interface.

The lab’s work focuses (among other things) on human-robot interaction, robot vision, interactive learning, and disaster response. The ease-of-use of multitouch controls is clearly valuable in all of those scenarios. As Evan Ackerman gushes at BotJunkie, “Its not even that theres anything that innovative going on here, strictly Its just that Surface is able to merge existing hardware and existing controls into a new interface, which makes all the difference.” Ackerman also notes that very little innovation in robotics research is happening at the UI level; the fact that a consumer/commercial product can be introduced on this end solves a slew of practical problems for existing robotics, not to mention potentially putting control of the technology in the hands/fingertips of many more people.

Now imagine if this research merged with the retail applications of Surface already in use. You go to a bar, touch a table, order a drink — and a robot navigates the room and brings it to you.

From UMass-Lowell Robotics Lab via the Microsoft Robotics Blog and BotJunkie.

Related posts:

• D&D + Microsoft Surface = Unheard-of Levels of Radness
• First Look: Microsoft Milan Surface Computer A Table That Knows Whats On It
• Microsoft to Install Surface Systems in AT&T Stores
• Microsoft Shows Off Surface in Sheraton Hotels
• Quadrocopters Work Together to Lift Loads, Destroy Mankind
• Robo Spiders Are Multilegged Mechanical Marvels
• Gallery: Robot Bartenders Sling Cocktails for Carbon-Based Drinkers

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