Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

Still weird: The mouse is more accurate than a finger

(1/2) > >>

superboyac:
I still find it weird that the mouse is still more accurate to use than a finger.  I've been using a touchscreen for a while now, and it's not even close.  Touching the screen with a finger should be intuitively more better...I mean, you're just touching the actual thing you want to touch.  Yet doing it with the mouse is far easier, faster, accurate.  Is it because of the finger-pad being too big?  Would it be different if my finger ended in a needle-tip?  I don't think so.

It seems to be one of the main things holding back touch screens.  What is going to be the breakthrough here?  I can't even guess.

SeraphimLabs:
It because the size of the fingertip is far larger than the size of a mouse cursor- and you can quickly and efficiently adjust a cursor down to being only a single pixel in size where it can be quickly and accurately aligned by eye using an on-screen grid.

Touchpads you can touch of course, but the finger is rather big and awkward. That's why we have tweezers and pliers for precise stuff, and why devices were using a stylus for a time before touch-friendly UIs were really developed very far.

Ath:
It's because you have to hover your entire arm above the screen, and point at something quite small, like a pixel on the screen and at ~400 dpi they can be quite small, versus resting your arm on a desk and finely control sliding a piece of plastic (the mouse) representing a sharply shaped pointer toward that same, still small, pixel.

Deozaan:
One of the problems with touch screens is the fact that as of 2014, humans still don't have transparent hands.

If your input device obscures your view of what you're interacting with*, you're gonna have problems.

* unless your obscured view is compensated for in other ways, such as tactile feedback.

superboyac:
good points.
The more I think about it, the more impressed I am by the mouse.  Tough to say, but it's one of very few inventions that was basically perfect right from the start, what, over 50 years ago?  Pretty amazing feat.

i really have no idea what the next input device breakthrough will be, especially in relation to touchscreens.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page