
Observations from a 4 year old's first interaction with MS Surface - nebula
http://blogs.conchango.com/richardwand/archive/2008/11/19/breaking-down-traditional-barriers.aspx
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decode
I thought this was interesting: "She found selecting, moving and orientating
the photos very intuitive using natural gestures. She took a little guidance
to get a handle on photo resizing but by the time she’d played for 15 minutes
she had got to grips with it and could shrink and enlarge the photos with
relative ease."

So moving images was easy and resizing them was hard. 15 minutes seems like a
long time for a 4 year-old to learn a skill like that relatively well.

I think the conclusion you can draw from this, and the rest of the article, is
that she could quickly do things that behaved exactly as they do in the real
world (e.g. pushing a picture across a table), but things fell apart as soon
as a new action had to be learned. That's why some of the actions seemed
"intuitive," because they fit exactly into previous experience. I wonder if it
would have been easier for her if they had played the "stretch a newspaper
comic with silly putty" game a few days before.

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tomerico
After watching the video, I think the problem she had in resizing is not
because it isn't intuitive, but because it required more delicate movement.
The same reason it would be harder for her to twist a screw driver than to hit
a hammer.

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ben_straub
Having played with one of these, and knowing how it works under the hood, it's
more likely that she just didn't have the technique right. Surface prefers you
use single fingertips as points of control; Isobel was using her entire hand.

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crocowhile
I remember when the multi-touch first came out and everybody was excited. Few
years and thousands of iphones have passed and the only "revolutionary" thing
we can do with it is still zoom-in and zoom-out pinching pictures.

I am quite amazed by the resistance people have when thinking about HDI: take
the multitouch pad on the new mac, for instance. I love it, but why there
isn't even a way to do something like middle mouse button?

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nudded
middle mouse button isn't relevant in the context of a trackpad imho. I also
don't see the need for it (except closing FF tabs).

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crocowhile
It's not just for browsing (FF let you close tabs and open new ones too when
you middle click on a link). For instance it is instrumental if you want unix-
like copy and paste, to which I am addicted by now.

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rfunduk
Don't you just have your other hand on the keyboard all the time anyway? Set
FF to open everything in tabs, so that's solved, and then use cmd+: w to close
windows, q to quit, c to copy, v to paste, etc etc... they're all right there
under your non-trackpad fingers.

I didn't even use middle-click back before wheel mice (when they literally had
3 _buttons_ ).

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jbronn
I was at TNRIS, a Texas GIS conference, and MS had a Surface there. I admit it
was really cool to fly through Virtual Earth imagery with it, but it was
pretty buggy. After a few minutes of light use I managed to freeze the
interface, crashing the surface service, subsequently sending the machine back
to the Vista desktop.

Unfortunately, this is my typical experience with most Microsoft software
products.

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rfunduk
It didn't look very smooth either, the pictures jumped around a lot and...
wait did you say _Vista desktop_!? Nevermind :)

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baddox
Alternate title: "World's smallest person plays with an iPhone."

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cgs
This is somewhat tangential to the story, but I think virtual painting, while
novel, deprives a young child of the sensory experience necessary at that age.

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mbrubeck
Paints and paper are also an abstract technology, and time spend working on
paper takes kids away from walking and other physical, outdoor experiences.
Obviously it can go too far, but most of us feel that painting and drawing and
writing and reading have become part of the appropriate mix of experiences for
children in our culture.

Computers are no different. I do make sure my toddler spends almost all her
time away from glowing screens, but I also remember that I first really got
into computers over twenty years ago by spending hours with MacPaint. My
daughter is growing up in a world where her parents work all day on computers,
play on computers, and talk to friends and family through computers. She's
going to be influenced by that, and I'd like it to be as an active participant
and not just an observer.

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frossie
Also in my experience, kids are less interested in computers than we were
precisely because they are so ubiquitous.

Back to the original artice: We ruined my 2 year old by letting her play with
an iPhone (which she can handle perfectly well - find videos, look at photos
as she pleases). Now she expects every screen to be multi-touch. I haven't
tried her on the mouse - I figure technology will soon catch up with her
expectations :-)

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danbmil99
When our kid was 2 and a few months we set him up with an old-school
touchscreen. He had no problem playing games that would be hard for a 3.5 yr
old with a mouse. May not sound like much, but a year at that age is huge, and
even at 4, as the article states, kids are just barely getting the hang of a
mouse. By 4, our kid was a mouse jockey. Transitioning from touchscreen to
mouse was trivial.

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dave_au
Nice article, although this bit seemed a bit of a stretch:

> This highlights how the direct manipulation and natural gestures of
> Microsoft Surface can blur the real and virtual world.

I can imagine that results may vary for people older than 4 years old.

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pohl
Imagine that in the future, after enough Moore cycles, this amazing technology
is shrunk down to a multi-touch device that can fit in your pocket!

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riffic
yeah I can't wait

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jseifer
The future is a big-ass table: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZrr7AZ9nCY>

