"A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wavebands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive - you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme."
This is from 1979 of course.
"He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. The way it functioned was very interesting. When the Drink button was pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic examination of the subject's metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject's brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea."
The first one seems more troublesome. This is less intuitive than touch screen based interface. The only way I see fighting against this is to standardize a set of generic gestures, map onto existing equivalent touch/voice actions and push it to the Android ecosystem. But not sure how many third party manufacturers will join this parade. Does this technology work well under screen? The industry is now obsessed with getting rid of notch and if Soli blocks this path then it will be a pretty hopeless fight.
"Alexa, set temperature to <x> degrees"
"Alexa, set volume to <x> or increase/decrease volume"
Not to mention, half the utility of the gestures is the ability to interact with messy/wet hands. Snapping my fingers near my phone in that situation isn't attractive.
Maybe teaching a gesture to your phone is the most accessable option, respects culture and disability the best.
It's a shame though, I did like the intentionality that the sound of snapping fingers afforded.
For the Google Pixel 4 that they are using in the video you already have a big display. It can instruct you how to gesture so that you learn it and later it can let you gesture without instructions.
> The second is what's known as the Midas touch problem. How can the system differentiate if you are intentionally gesturing as input vs incidentally gesturing?
Either an activation word like you said, or it could use the front-side camera to see whether or not you are looking at it.
Do you have any examples of well structured learnable systems? I have struggled to find much of anything in this space, yet every technology release I see wants for it.
Here are my two examples, I have no others off the top of my mind. I am more impressed with the vim example.
1. `vim-pandoc-syntax` has a set of documents exampling the feature-set of markdown. These documents are the system they document. Here is one file in a directory of 10 such documents.
https://github.com/vim-pandoc/vim-pandoc-syntax/blob/master/...
2. The KDE shortcuts manager, which lets you see what's bound and bind new things:
https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/applications/fundamentals/sho...
I have yet to hear a good response to this question.
I have a Pixel 3 and I want a manual for the device, it appears one does not exist. Nor does documentation. My headphones which came in the box don't resume the most recent media player when I tap the middle button, I called support and over the course of an hour they found they have the same issue. Before my call the people I spoke to said I was wrong and didn't know this issue existed, aftewards they had no advice for me other than to give up. My issue persists.
That's the same reason for why I think voice controls are literally the worst way to interact with a computer ever(although I think this might actually top it).
This is why I had to change my Amazon Echo Dot's call word back from "Computer". Turns out one might say "computer" a lot during the course of the day, and Alexa was CONSTANTLY going off when it shouldn't have. It was so disappointing that I gave the echo dot away.
It looks like this on my end: https://imgur.com/F65dvgX
How hard would it be to teach ourselves to inhibit the electrical impulses to our motor system when BCI can identify intent?
When would this level of BCI be possible if you had to make an educated guess?
Thanks for sharing, as a fellow HCI/Cog Sci graduate!
The nicest thing about physical buttons in say a car is that I don't have to look at it to know what I'm doing.
(I know very little about any of this)
The first is learnability. A big problem with gestures is that there is no clear affordance as to what kinds of gestures you can do, or any clear feedback. For feedback, one could couple Soli's input with a visual display, but at that point, it's not clear if there is a big advantage over a touchscreen, unless the display is really small.
The second is what's known as the Midas touch problem. How can the system differentiate if you are intentionally gesturing as input vs incidentally gesturing? The example I used was the new Mercedes cars that have gesture recognition. While I was doing a test drive, the salesperson started waving his hands as part of his normal speech, and that accidentally raised the volume. Odds are very high Soli will have the same problem. One possibility is to activate Soli via a button, but that would defeat a lot of the purpose of gestures. Another is to use speech to activate, which might work out. Yet another possibility is that you have to do a special gesture "hotword", sort of like how Alexa is activated by saying it's name.
At any rate, these problems are not insurmountable, but it definitely adds to the learning curve, reliability, and overall utility of these gesture based interfaces.