On 03/11/14 14:26, Len Ovens wrote:
On Mon, 3 Nov 2014, Simon Wise wrote:
it is the combination of real knobs and faders with the visual feed back of a
touch screen for selecting and viewing things that works well ... it has been
the basis of some very high end studio mixing systems for a while now. A
Even lower end digital mixers use this mix of interface, Yes it can be very
flexable. Adjusting EQ "Q" with two fingers, while at the same time setting
centre frequescy and level is nice.
any movement of multiple points in a 2 dimensional parameter space is hard to do
well any other way, likewise drawing curves can be useful ... and the range of 2
or 3 finger gestures that are becoming familiar (and hence thought of as
intuitive) are potentially very useful.
Audio has plenty of examples where placement, translation, rotation, scaling etc
in 2 parameter dimensions makes sense.
biggish button displayed on a touchsceen requires less fiddling/distraction
than using a mouse and cursor if you are mostly using your hands for the
keyboard and real controls ... plus there are some types of control that can
be done with multi-touch or pen quite nicely ... (certainly not knobs, faders
and buttons)
Using touch screen over mouse for those things that are on screen I like. Using
a touch ecreen to replace tactile level controls I am less sure of... Though to
be honest some of the very early versions I used to control overall velocity on
the Atari might have worked well with touchscreens. They were not visual sliders
or knobs, but a button/label where clicking and holding while moving up or down
adjusted level. While moving up or down the mouse pointer may have been over
some other control, but so long as the mouse button was held down it did not
matter. The only visual feed back was the numeric value of the velocity offset
changing. Horizontal movement of the mouse was ignored. The only downside for
this becomes realestate. A control too close to the edge of the screen ends up
with a limited range of control... That is a control near the top is limited to
moving the level higher and a control near the bottom is limited to how much
lower it can go. Designing the display to use the screen edges for display only
use and putting controls towards screen centre could help or defining up as
up/right and down as down/left might help too. Any of the ideas used on the
Atari would work just as easy on any GUI. In fact the same techniques are used
in some software,
e.g. puredata, though that GUI is a bit old and tired ... there is work bringing
it a more modern framework.
The idea of using the touch screen to select the control and then using a
knob/shuttle/joystick/trackball/mouse to change the value also makes a lot of
sense. Most of the digital mixers I have seen use both a large number of real
knobs/faders with selection to extend them.
I used a couple of 6DOF "spaceballs" as a control in that way, old ones that had
been built very solidly (and cost very serious cash when they were new, but ebay
is great for that kind of stuff). In this case for projections rather than
audio, but they make sense anywhere that rate-of-change in a 3 dimensional
parameter space is being controlled (especially where orientation is also
significant, or where more parameters fit into this particular arrangement of 6
dimensions.
Simon
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