Gestural Interfaces: Hope for the Future
Sunday, January 20, 2008 at 12:42PM 
In my post on gestural interfaces I bade software designers to get their interfaces out from in between us and our work. One way to do this is with a custom UI that lives in the physical world.
Color grading for film and video is an area where a tactile user interface enables an artist to do more, faster. A colorist might grade a feature film in only a few weeks, performing many hundreds of creative decisions per hour. With Apple Color now in the playing field with lower-cost grading solutions like SpeedGrade and Scratch, there is a great interest in the control surfaces that make this possible. But not enough interest to bring the cost of these physical interfaces as far down as the software prices have dropped.
But there is hope. Apple's new MacBook Air brings some new multitouch gestures to OS X. We alreday use the trackpad as a kind of virtual control surface in Magic Bullet Looks, and it's easy to imagine using the new gestures to increase this power (once they come to more full-featured laptops of course).
But the first time you rotate a photo in Preview.app on a MacBook Air, you can't help but wonder how amazing it would be if that trackpad was a bit bigger and was a screen itself.
Fortunately there are people who've been working on exactly that. JazzMutant has two shipping products, Lemur and Dexter (the difference between which eludes me) that allow innovative multitouch control of Digital Audio Workstations. Art Lebedev Studios is showing a concept for a keyless keyboard that can be reconfigured as whatever multitouch UI you can imagine.
The Lemur and Dexter are each about US$3K, which might seem like a lot, but consider this. The "good" control surfaces for Color cost over US$15K, with the cheap alternative running about $US8K. These are big, single-purpose devices, whereas a multitouch display can be your color control surface today and an audio mixing board tomorrow.
Still, in a world where color correction software that once cost US$25K is now a free toy surprise inside a box of crackerjacks, the solution should be clear: clever software that takes advantage of UI devices that are inexpensive because they're not purpose-built for our niche. In other words, by the time a multitouch accessory becomes so inexpensive that you can't afford not to have it, it may well be a default shipping option on an iMac.
Either way, I hope Apple's Color team, as well as developers at Iridas, Assimilate, Adobe and Autodesk are looking at these new interfaces and thinking of ways to let us cut, color and combine our movies with them.
Reader Comments (10)
Hi Stu,
I dont know if your familiar with Chung Lee his experiment with the Nintendo Wii. Look at this link to see his experiments which shows that there are already cheap solution for gestural interfaces. I especially like the head tracking one.
Have fun:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/
AFAIK the JazzMutant products differ in that the Lemur has an editor to create your own totally custom interfaces while Dexter is more of a preset product.
I think that part of the issue with control surfaces for CC is that it has traditionally been such a niche market that manufacturerers of these products such as JL Cooper have a limited number of potential buyers and have to keep costs high as a result.
Add to this that they build these devices like tanks ready to withstand the day to day rigors of a professional post house.
Your point about making a generic interface that can be customized for a series of applications ( CC, NLE, Sound etc) is spot on. Once these devices are multi-purposed, the costs to produce them should drop since volume will be much higher.
Alton Brown never buys a kitchen gadget that has a single purpose. We all need to follow his great advice in all gadgets :)
I need a new control surface, and an audio guy showed me this...
http://www.euphonix.com/artist/products/mc_control/tour.php
One can run several FCP, Logic, STP all simultaneoulsy, and switch back and forth through the control surface.
A step in the right direction.
As for an overall thought - Colecovision Super Action controller. That thing changed everything.
I need a new control surface, and an audio guy showed me this...
http://www.euphonix.com/artist/products/mc_control/tour.php
One can run several FCP, Logic, STP all simultaneoulsy, and switch back and forth through the control surface.
A step in the right direction.
As for an overall thought - Colecovision Super Action controller. That thing changed everything.
what exactly is the difference between something like dexter/lemur and a say a standard stinkpad tablet running custom software?
as for gestural interface tools there's plenty of gestural input tools, the issue is feedback tools. How do you communicate by touch that something has happened. The cheap solution is rumble packs, from there you have tools that have actuators that force feedback. The really expensive tools are still gloves that have for example memory metal to give a sense of touch, right up to complex haptic research tools.
following my reply I was looking at haptic interfaces in wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haptic
in it mentions a very cool, very cheap force feedback solution called Novint falcon. I haven't seen it here in blightly but it looks exactly the sort of lost cost haptic interface you might be looking for.
Since you actually run a software development house, you may be able to obtain samples free. It may prove especially useful in production uses.
it "makes virtual items and experiences feel real...interact with a virtual object, environment, or character,...letting you feel texture, shape, weight, dimension, and dynamics...the physical characteristics of virtual objects and environments."
a totally off the top of my head example would be for example using a colour wheel for colour range but pressure for colour intensity, thus scanning across a surface will feel like a ball twisting back and in forth in your hands with varying degrees of colour translating to pressure in your hands - what we would describe as a roughness of surface.
ok that may not be usable but I have never seen haptic technology so cheap in the last 15 years!
interesting new haptic interface
http://technology.newscientist.com/channel/tech/dn13410-levitating-joystick-improves-computer-feedback.html
Hi Stu, I'm an editor here at OReilly and we are working on a book titled Designing Gestural Interfaces and I'm wondering if you would like to review the manuscript?
Please drop me a line if you are interested at maryatoreilly.com. Thank you, Mary
Well now things like the Tangent wave and Euphonix MC Color *my favorite of the two* Are making things more interesting. Also there is a rumor that Red is working with Euphonix a bit.