I bought my wife a new laptop last week and it has a swiveling touchscreen. I decided to install Opticks and see how well the touchscreen worked. Most of the gestures and dragging worked quite well. The "throw down/up" gestures map to PgUp/PgDn (fairly standard keys for web browsers, etc.) which change viewed bands in Opticks and the rotate gestures didn't do anything, but everything else worked quite well.
Gestures and multitouch are starting to make some definate advancements. MacOS has build-in gesture support and so does Windows 7. The Qt toolkit (used by Opticks and at least one other ELT) is working on defining a gesture API. Touchscreen laptops with gesture support are easy to find and relatively inexpensive and early versions of more advanced (and larger) devices like the Microsoft Surface are already available. There are a number of research projects desiging low cost multitouch systems out of the Wii, LASER pointers, and other commodity hardware.
So, how will this effect GEOINT/MASINT/IMINT? Would you, as an analyst or production manager, use a Surface or similar device to perform analysis? Would you use it for presentation (Google Earth, etc.) purposes? How about a hybrid system like the one used in Quantum of Solace which has a Surface multitouch table and a variety of wall mounted displays which integrate seamlessly?
Here's how I see a possible future for exploitation labs. Data comes into a TPED system and goes through a variety of preprocessing steps and then gets pushed onto a queue alongside the applicable task. A production manager's workstation consists of a large (50"+) display above his/her station which is viewable by anyone in the lab. This contains the currently assigned tasks and the next few incoming tasks. The PM also has a smaller touchscreen system with items in other parts of the workflow; tasks waiting for review, deferred items, recently complete items, etc. Also present are avatars for analysts who have completed (or nearly completed) their current tasking. Drag and drop on the touchscreen assigns tasks or defers them.
An analyst has a larger (30") monitor for active data and a couple of smaller displays (all touchscreens) for suplemental information including "social networking" and collaboration displays. Their computers have nice graphics processing capability and reasonable CPU and RAM resources so basic algorithms can be applied. Long running algorithms get queued and run on a cluster of computer servers shared by the lab. Common computation tasks will begin running automatically when the data is ingested. While these run, the analyst can perform background research, etc. or can begin working another task.
Final products are published and show up in the TPED system. There's a conference room with a large Surface and a variety of passive wall mounted (or projection) displays. When a briefing begins, background information and slides are displayed on the wall. Google Earth show up on the surface for interactive viewing or analysis products. Links and imagery products can be "thrown" onto the wall as needed.
Note there isn't a keyboard or a mouse in the system with the possible exception of the analyst who would use a keyboard for background searches, etc., but this could be a "soft" keyboard on a touch screen. This removes devices which hamper common workflows and maximizes physical space which can be used for additional displays or additional personel. Smaller analysis computers concentrate on visualization and HCI performance while computational (especially backgrounded computation) performance is moved to shared compute servers. This lowers the cost (monetary, power, and heat costs) of individual work stations while concentrating on the resources most needed. The product display system is a look back to traditional light tables and wall boards, a system that encourages collaboration and group interaction. Since it is an electronic system, another briefing room (perhaps in a mobile command center) can mirror the views and interact with the expert analysts in real time.
Thoughts?
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