ah coke robot, me and you have done the rounds on the whole touch debate.
and it still doesn't have a place in the workspace. at least not at a cost effective price point to be deployed on any scale worth considering.
the microsoft desk thingy, is frankly brilliant and would see wide spread use but you'll only ever see a few in any company they will never need more than that for the time being, later on with advances in tech devices like it will be far more common but that's a long long way off yet.
companies have so much more to consider than asthetics, while important don't pay the bills, touch looks nice but everyday use makes it more challenging to find reasons to want it, in an epos system it's functional, in a design studio it's pointless, in a video suite it could be good but then that requires the software to use with it.
considering most major and small companies use tailored software of some kind designed and written to meet their needs touch won't find a place for some time in the work place.
tesco for example use touch on their pos systems
barclays bank don't
just imagine for one second the cost involved in going touch for some companies, small companies probably won't be able to afford it and big companies would have to spend a small fortune to do such an upgrade.
the legal issues with health and safety would need to be redone that costs money too, that's all before you even buy the touch systems which cost more than your average pc, seeing as they don't seem to buy all in ones.
other companies use dummy terminals, cheaper to deploy on mass.
Companies like shell/BP would need to test the systems in a workplace before mass deployment to see if it helped productivity and would need to make sure the investment was worthwhile.
as nice as touch is and windows 8 those and the software available is no where near good enough or cheap enough to be deployed on mass in a work place.
in the home it's even less appealing, gesture control methods are going to become more common and are already taking off in the TV industry, with products like the leap motion for pc and the upcoming kinect for pc (the xbox version can already control windows) touch is looking even more out of date.
with the leap motion i don't need new monitors or to change my workspace, i stick it in tell it how i want to perform tasks and where i want my hands to be and it does it for me, if that means turning a portion of my desk into a veritable touch pad through pre defined setup then that's far more appealing than having to touch a screen.
you say touch i say gesture. and there are even alternatives to those in the works.
touch isn't new or fancy it's old and while usable in small form factors and very good at it, the desktop environment is just not the place for it.
That's nice.
Well, as I see it, touch isn't mainstream in the PC segment where the VAST majority of computing technology users are. Yeah, touch is on POS terminals and all. And? What about the PC in general? Why hasn't touch come to it when everything else has gone touch? Frankly, touch isn't outdate and isn't mainstream enough to be considered out of date.
No, touch isn't cost effective, yet. That's what happens when a new technology comes into play, it's pricy at first and after a while of market saturation the cost comes down. Twenty-seven years ago, a PC would had cost thousands and thousands of dollars. Nowadays, a CPU can cost 50 dollars and process more information than probably a whole house full of those out of date PCs. LCD monitors are the most recent example. They were expected to become mainstream in the early to mid-2000s. At the time of availability to the consumer market in the '90s, they were a pricy thing to have. Say, not cost effective enough to deploy in the enterprise and just not worth the while in the home. Nowadays, you can get a 27 inch LCD monitor for a few hundred dollars at a resolution no one had even though of using fifteen years ago.
Speaking of health concerns, interesting you mention that. It's been found that the average keyboard and mouse has more germs than a common toilet. I believe Microsoft has a patent that uses a touch monitor's backlighting (I believe) to emit UV lighting enough to kill germs off the screen. LOT more healthier than disease riddled peripherals!
And for software and the implementation along with use of touch, WOW! Hardcore and professional Photoshoppers, game developers and designers, architects, and other design work is generally done with touch. Wacom has a line of touch screen monitors that shame ALL touch screens, they tilt down to be a drawing board, have a stylus with programmable functions for Photoshop, as well as touch pads to further interact with the image. Game developers, such as the ones that built and designed Halo 4, use touch screens to develop game maps. Touch and stylus are the wave of the future, as they're both natural inputs. One is simply a pure method of interaction with your finger, the other is a more precise method of input that humanity has been doing since it's taken a stick and drew something in a cave. The time of paper and pen has turn into touchscreen and stylus. Save the earth!
Now, I'm not going to disparage gesture input as that is the bees knees and is just way cool. But the Leap Motion system costs 70 dollars, I've yet to see it on sale, and it hasn't been tested or shown off with Windows 8. The company's claim of being more accurate than the Kinect is bold, as well as the price. As the saying goes, "if it's too good to be true, it probably is." Besides, gesture input is SUCH an untested technology as well as unproven and will require more time to refine it to be great and worthwhile, as well as being precise and accurate. Also, the Kinect for Windows doesn't actually control Windows itself, it's not so much as a general input device. It's primarily being used to develop apps on Windows that use the Kinect like for retail stores and such. An app has to be coded to take advantage of the Kinect's hardware. This is unfortunate as I don't get why Microsoft couldn't develop a driver that can use it as an input device. From what I've seen, it can be hacked to do so. I personally would love to use the Kinect or the Leap Motion system as another input device, so I can be a good distance away from my PC but still being able to control it without touching the screen. I'll be in line for that! That, along with touch and speech is the perfect Natural User Interface model that Microsoft's Research division is most likely working on.
Touch on the desktop can work and will work.