Rawen's Musings

We all have seen some really cool sci-fi movies or series and/or played sci-fi themed games. And in all of them we have these cool gadget with voice controls, various panels of vehicles with super responsive touch screens or holographic interfaces that you can pretty much “carry around”. Like, remember first Avatar movie where one of the main characters LITERALLY grabs a file and puts it into their tablet? Cool as hell. Or Tony in Iron Man 2 where he “disassembles” the expo model to find the proper element for his mini arc reactor? Amazing spectacle to watch.

I bet some of you were thinking “how amazing would that be in real life”? To have, for example, an interface for designing where you project your model into real space and be able to toy with it? Or have a computer screens floating around and you could move them anywhere you wanted. Sure, you can do both in VR these days but it’d be better without having to wear specialised glasses, right?

Or would it?

“Did I press the button? And which one?”

All these systems have the “cool factor” as the first goal since they’re to attract the viewer. This means you can “ease up” on the actual practicality. But when transferring into the real world, we can’t really hand-wave these away. Take touchscreens for example. A tech as ubiquitous sliced bread these days. Phones, tablets, infotainment panels etc. Stuff that was see as “future” during Star Trek Next Generation is now an everyday sight. But is it better?

Well … it’s good but not necessarily better. During times of resistive displays (the ones you had to press a little for the touch to register), not only were the controls a little clumsy but also user interfaces were not adapted for them. Usually being ports of cursor controlled applications, having to control the either with a stylus or worse, you fingers was an exercise in patience.

Enter capacitive displays which we’re using now, which rely on conductivity instead of light pressure. Cool, I don’t need to squish my screen anymore. Except now it can react to a light touch of anything conductive. And whoo boy, don’t get me started on when your fingers are wet. The rodeo of “misclicks” can get insane. Also, remember the stylus you could use for precision? You still can, but not just any simple one. Hell, with resistive display you could use the rubber end of a pencil.

Then of course we have the other part of the question, did I actually press the “button”? With a hardware one you can’t really guess because of the feedback. With touchscreen however? Well, you can have for example a phone slightly vibrate if you did. But does it really compare to the physical sensation of pressing the actual button?

Now imagine say a keyboard you type on. There have been concepts of laptops using touchscreens as keyboards. There’s even a laser projector which can “create” a keyboard on any surface. First impression? WOW! And then you think about how to use it properly and suddenly you’re like “Ummm …” Because how can you type effectively when you can’t really say that you pressed the key? Let alone the correct one? Which nicely leads us to …

“Where’s the damn button?!”

Ahh, transition smooth like butter. Anyway, back to the typing and feedback. Everyone who spends extensive time writing on any type of computer or if you’re old-school a typewriter, knows and will fight teeth and nails (claws :p) to have actual keys. Because when you type, you don’t look at the keyboard but at what you’re tying, navigating the keyboard only by memory and the tactile feedback of your fingers. For this you ABSOLUTELY need physical buttons. Like, there’s a reason typing “with all ten” is called touch-typing. And how do you “touch-type” when you can’t touch your keyboard? Having to look down not only lowers your focus but also slows you down.

Which leads to an even worse use of touchscreens which is downright dangerous and irresponsible in my opinion; cars or any vehicle you have to drive and pay attention on the road. Touchscreens in car panels are downright idiotic. Because in a car you should basically have your eyes glued on the road ahead, only navigating other controls either by memory or taking in visual info through your peripheral vision without shifting your focus. But again, how do you navigate something by memory if you have no other feedback but vision? You know, that one sense you can’t really focus on something else? The reason this works for example in a plane or say in a ship is because you don’t really need to look around. Hitting something in the air or on sea is extremely unlikely and you would be focusing on the information your systems are giving you anyway so you can easily have the visual feedback. But not in a car.

“NO! Don’t shave the tile! Save the file!”

At this point you could ask “what if we don’t need to touch buttons but command the machine with our voice?” Enter voice control and voice-operated assistants. And yes, there’s something neat about telling a tiny box on your shelf or counter “Turn on the lights and set them to warm light to make for a cosy mood.” or ask your phone for directions. Until you realise you have to be really clear with what you want because the assistant has to understand the command. That means not just understanding what to do but also the language and your specific voice. Voice and language recognition are super complex fields of science that to this day aren’t anywhere near perfect. Hence why we have the occasional stupid moments with voice assistants. And that’s just for English language which is pretty ubiquitous in these gadgets and comparatively simple. Now extend this to all other languages and whoo boy are you in for a “treat”. This stuff would make even present day’s LLMs shit bricks. And you’d want something like this in a system that’s semi-critical?

So that’s pretty much why I’ll always defend physical buttons. Yes, Star Trek’s LCARS is cool and all but buttons I can control blind and I only need to memorise the layout. And then there’s the satisfying “click” sound just as the proverbial cherry on top, says happily clicking away on his mechanical keyboard.

R.R.A.