
Pre-Touch Sensing for Mobile Interaction [video] - sarreph
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiZkEYLXctE
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Yhippa
> Microsoft had been planning to use a number of sensors on the sides of a
> device to detect how a phone is held by grip, allowing 3D Touch-enabled
> phones to block an orientation switch when you're lying down in bed.

This is a highly underrated feature.

~~~
MawNicker
WOOOOOOOOW!

They seriously do that? This alone could get me to switch. Switching from the
iPad 2 to the iPad Air 2 was painful because they removed the physical switch
that could be used to lock orientation. I used to use it for this. Now I have
to swipe up (sometimes twice depending on the app) toggle rotation and then
swipe down. First world problems. I know. But it's really annoying. To just
detect the situation with no interaction is absolutely amazing. It's the sort
of subtle solution I would expect from Apple specifically in contrast to
Microsoft.

~~~
wlesieutre
My Z3 Compact has a feature where it will automatically reorient the screen
unless you rotate the phone _slowly_ , in which case it keeps the orientation
fixed. Sony calls it "Smart Rotation".

It works great except when it doesn't. Pretty frequently I'll lie down, use
the phone for a couple of minutes, and then while holding the phone perfectly
still it'll go "HEY THE PHONE IS IN LANDSCAPE I'D BETTER ROTATE" all of a
sudden.

Which is to say, this kind of thing is _great_ if it's 100% reliable, but if
you only get to 95% it's a nuisance. More often than not I just manually lock
it because I expect the Smart Rotation feature to flake out, and fixing it
afterward is more work than locking at the start (rotate back to the right
orientation according to gravity, lock the rotation, then rotate back to my
viewing position).

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thom
I think on the whole you'd obviously rather have this capability than not, and
in the hands of developers interesting stuff will happen.

But I chuckled a little thinking back to all the Fitts's Law discussions that
used to go on about the Mac versus Windows menus - on the Mac, the hit area is
higher because you can just hit the top of the screen with your mouse. On
Windows, it was always lower, because you had to aim below the title bar. This
reminded me a bit of that - full fledged touches are dead easy to get right,
hovering slightly less so. So I'd hope if this makes it into the final
platform (or inevitably gets copied) that there's a lot of guidance to
developers to use it only for enhancing existing gestures, instead of making
it a primary mode of interaction.

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vezycash
Microsoft has this habit of being first in a market, technology and then
either ignoring it or releasing a shitty solution. I'm not an Apple guy. Use
both windows PC and phone.

So I'm not being biased against Microsoft when I say that the best bet we've
got to seeing this tech in an actual product is for Apple to (invent it)
release it first.

~~~
Natanael_L
Or you look at the Samsung S4 with air view.

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emehrkay
I want this simply to have :hover states in mobile web sites. The pre-
anticipation mode makes a lot of sense and makes tapping to show controls seem
archaic

~~~
ygra
Fingers already don't have much precision when tapping. It's even worse when
hovering, so hover states on your DOM elements are likely not to work in a
useful way. And then just imagine a menu that opens on hover suddenly
obscuring the whole site. I'd rather take just the highlight of links in the
browser as shown in the video than trying to adapt touch screens back to
interfaces that were meant to be used with much higher-precision pointing
devices.

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rocky1138
I am a frustrated mobile phone touchscreen user, feeling like the phone never
quite knows what I want to do. This is the first time I've felt a touchscreen
might actually be able to help me be more productive, rather than a roadblock.

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samstave
This is freaking awesome.

If anyone from MS is reading this, though, please have the following feature:
I'd like to be able to select hover-touch behaviour for various modes: if the
phone is locked and the screen is off, hovering with one finger will show me
the time, hovering with two might show me mail/text notifications, or maybe a
certain hover gesture will open the camera immediately so I can quickly take
that pic. etc.

I'd like to define certain hover patterns and responses.

Overall though, super cool.

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jeena
Finally we'll get back :hover for websites.

~~~
Natanael_L
On Samsung S4 with its air view on and a plugin app for Chrome on Samsung
devices, you did have real literal hover support

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lost_name
The Galaxy S4 had something like this, except no one (other than the Samsung
apps) implemented the functionality to make use of it.

In the end, all I can remember of it was that you could wave over the top of
the screen to change home screens, and see a little light ball would move
around on the lock screen when you moved your finger over it.

~~~
nevi-me
Google Chrome, WhatsApp have implemented it. It still exists on S5, not sure
about S6 and S7.

There's also the awesome touch sensitivity feature which when enabled allows
you to use the touchscreen with gloves.

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LoSboccacc
while the demo is amazing with all the possibilities presented, isn't moving
interface elements around quite disorienting for the user?

~~~
ygra
Theoretically maybe. Practically likely no. First of all, this is (assuming
perfect sensor accuracy) fairly predictable in that identical interactions
yield identical results. It's not very random. Then there is the whole point
that the UI presented is context-aware in that it knows where your finger is.
Thus is has the potential to be much _better_ to use than a static UI.

You can probably compare it to the clipboard copy button appearing near your
selection instead of in a static place on the screen. While it's not in the
same location every time, it's in a _sensible_ and usable location.

Of course, this all presumes that you never make mistakes, such as mistakenly
assuming that a thumb from the left is used while it's actually the opposite.
Then the experience is much worse. However, considering how often my phone
thinks it should go to landscape mode while in portrait (never), I guess
that's not going to happen often either. If things go wrong, it's your touch-
screen. You probably wouldn't worry much about UI popping up in strange places
when you simply cannot use your phone.

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JadeNB
Isn't " _are_ magnificent" (as opposed to " _would be_ magnificent") a bit of
a stretch? I can't watch the video right now, but it sounds like it is a
concept video for something that was never actually implemented. As such, it
is wonderful to dream big and to reward big dreams; but that should not, I
think, be confused with delivering on those big dreams.

EDIT: Thanks to dang for changing this. Just to be clear, my post referred to
the original title, taken from The Verge article which was originally linked.

~~~
sarreph
I would update the title to your suggestion, as I agree with you — but I want
to be true to _The Verge_ — I imagine it's classic PR spin on their part...

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TeMPOraL
This is amazing! I so want it right now!

That said, there's one "feature" I'd like to see implemented first on the
modern smartphones - make them stop lagging and hanging! Seriously, this is
ridiculous. Any UI improvement like this will be more annoying than helpful on
today's smartphones, because the phone will randomly refuse to detect or react
to "hover".

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aaronsnoswell
I saw an internal demo of this technology 4 years ago at Windows Phone. Nice
to see it finally making it's way into daylight.

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vain
looks like apple's force touch with negative numbers

~~~
iLoch
Kinda like how a car looked like a horse without legs?

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edimaudo
People still use Windows phone?

~~~
chiph
I liked my Windows Phone a lot. It was the most responsive phone I'd used in
years, and I could resize the tiles to the shape and position that I wanted,
so my most common apps were more accessible.

But then they laid off 7400 division employees and had no product roadmap, and
it was obvious they were going to write-off their investment in Nokia. So I
left not because I didn't like it, or liked something else more, but because
of a lack of confidence in their commitment to it.

Microsoft, you need to do a better job of announcing your direction.

~~~
Hovertruck
Agreed – I had a Lumia that I really loved, but there was a lack of direction
for the platform and severely lacking app ecosystem that ultimately brought me
back to an iPhone.

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dang
Url changed from
[http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/5/11595564/microsoft-3d-touch...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/5/11595564/microsoft-3d-touch-
kinect-gestures-windows-phones), which points to this.

