Innovation spawns new PC revolution

Tom Anderson, right, demonstrates Novint Technologies’ gaming technology to an attendee at the Coronado Ventures Forum in July. The Novint Falcon allows users to feel the recoil of a gun or the swipe of a sword. Photo Credit – Courtesy Photo

As technology continually advances, innovators always build new mousetraps to make the latest, greatest gadgets even better.

Now, computer technology is evolving to where the mouse — that perennial point-and-click desktop gadget for PCs — will become obsolete.

Point-and-click technology, or graphic user interface (GUI), is steadily giving way to touch screens and optical sensors that make computers do a lot more with a lot less human effort. That, in turn, is allowing innovative companies to design much better mousetraps for people to operate computers without the iconic mouse.

“Since graphic computer interface emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, followed by windows with point-and-click technology, not a lot has changed in the world of personal computers,” said New Mexico Technology Council Executive Director Eric Renz-Whitmore at an event in July to showcase new human-computer interaction (HCI) technology. “Increased processing power and the miniaturization of devices has opened up HCI as a rapidly emerging area.”

Many companies are now tapping that emerging technology to create innovative products, ushering in a new phase in the 40-year-old PC revolution.

“HCI has become the tag word for essentially anything without a keyboard and mouse,” said Jim Spadaccini, CEO of Ideum in Corrales, which presented its technology at the July Coronado Ventures Forum. “It’s a new era in computer capacity where people won’t be tied to desktops.”

Mobile, touch-screen devices are leading the way, but that’s just the beginning, said Brad Myers, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human Computer Interaction Institute.

“The technology is advancing to a point where it’s much more practical (and usable) in the real world,” he said.

A new sensing technique, for example, developed jointly by Carnegie Mellon and Disney Research, could eventually create things like a doorknob that knows whether to lock or unlock based on how it is grasped, a smartphone that silences itself if the user holds a finger to his lips or a chair that adjusts room lighting based on recognizing if a user is reclining or leaning forward.

“Significant improvement in sensor technology and much faster and better microprocessors to run complex algorithms and computation are enabling innovative companies to develop new devices with new capabilities,” Myers said.

In New Mexico, a number of startups are developing hardware and software to harness advanced human-computer interaction capabilities.

Ideum, a 13-year-old company that started in California and moved to Corrales in 2006, makes big-screen multi-touch computer tables for museums and businesses. The firm developed software that not only allows touch screens to sense contact with a hand, but also analyze what users want a computer to do based on how fingers are placed on the screen and how people move their hands.

“We’ve built intelligence into the software that can recognize a left hand from a right hand and respond to touch and motion,” Spadaccini said.

The software is used for exhibits on large, flat screens mounted on walls or stands that serve as touch-top tables. Unlike the old graphic user interface technology that has one icon input point that users click with a mouse, Ideum tables have dozens of imbedded input points to read hand gestures.

“We’re talking 40 or more input points where four or more people can use the table at the same time,” Spadaccini said. “It can read all their interactions simultaneously and respond correctly.”

The company has installed its screens at the Field Museum in Chicago, the Getty Center in Los Angeles and the Monterrey Bay Aquarium, among others. It’s also selling to commercial customers, such as apartment and condominium developers who use it display interactive maps, floor plan images and photographs.

Ideum’s revenue climbed from about $1 million in 2010 to nearly $2 million in 2011, and it expects to surpass $3 million this year. It employs 19 people at an 8,000-square-foot complex south of Corrales.

Customizabooks, another startup at the Coronado event, is converting children’s books to digital format for tablets and other mobile devices. Proprietary software lets readers replace illustrated characters with their own favorite personalities. Interactive pictures move and perform as children touch them. “You can make a bee in the book fly around the screen, or make a dinosaur walk up to you and roar,” said company co-founder Tom Anderson.

Anderson is a former Sandia National Laboratories scientist who helped integrate a sense of touch, or “haptics,” into 3-D computer graphics. He commercialized that technology through Albuquerque startup Novint Technologies Inc., which made touch-based training simulation programs, such as allowing dental students to feel vibration when drilling into teeth.

The company built a tripod-mounted control device for video games that allows users to feel 3-D shapes such as texture and weight. Through “force feedback,” the user also feels things like the recoil of a gun or the swipe of a sword. Novint merged in 2010 with ForceTek, which builds haptics-enabled exoskeleton controllers for video gaming.

“Technology is trending to where everyone will walk around with sophisticated, microphone- and camera-equipped computers that augment reality,” Anderson said. “Your camera phone will eventually look around and tell you things, such as what a store sells and the prices.”