We tend to think of the museum world as behind the times when it comes to technology. Say it ain’t so, Joe. Well Mr. Six Pack, it ain’t so. Those of us who are (have been) involved in museum technology know better. Ask yourself, when was the first time you saw and used a touchscreen? The odds are pretty high that it was a museum. I was personally retro-fitting touchscreens in about 1990 and have an extremely bad memory of 48 hours in Glasgow without sleep, dismantling some monitors and fitting touchscreens to them. Actually, the memory includes some really juicy extra-curricula activity, but all parties concerned have moved on and settled down, so that will have to wait for my memoirs.
Touchscreens have been in museums since the late 80′s. The first commercially available touchscreen was produced by Hewlett Packard in 1983, so its fitting that the first consumer touchscreen computer (that I’ve seen) is just being promoted by HP – only 25 years late.
Awesome and about time.
But wait. Why has it taken so long for touchscreens to hit the consumer market?
The answer is simple. A touchscreen on a home computer is about as useful as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking competition.
A touchscreen only benefits from a custom designed interface that separates all the “hot areas” by enough space to allow a “finger” to control. it That means anything “hot” needs to be at least one 1/2 inch in size and separated from the nearest “hot area” by at least one 1/2 inch. Anything less is going to be really, really annoyingly annoying. But all you interface designers know this.
The current promotional adverts for HP’s TouchSmart PC (the computer as you’ve never felt it before) show some cool touchscreen interface stuff that will be cool for about a minute, then frustration will set in, unless of course you buy one to build a museum interactive.
In the words of MC Hammer: Dah nah nah neh, nah neh, nah neh… Don’t touch this…
