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Microsoft wants super-sensitive finger strokes

Says fondleslabs must go faster to satisfy

Microsoft says today's touch screens have latency of 100 milliseconds between a finger hitting the glass and the image on the screen changing. At that speed, says Paul Dietz, Assistant Director of Microsoft Applied Sciences, fingers have moved ten centimetres and the “analogy of moving a real physical object breaks down.”

At one millisecond of latency Dietz says the experience of using a touch screen resembles using a real physical object.

Microsoft simulates one millisecond latency in the following video, but doesn't have the technology to make it happen:

Instead, Dietz says the Applied Sciences team believes one millisecond response time is a goal to shoot for over the next decade. ®

Anonymous Coward

Re: Erm...

-- "However now Microsoft are also seeing other people, they (Microsoft) can't drive the show so much anymore. Their new Beaus have other things to consider like power draw etc."

There's a large irony here with the whole Nokia business. Microsoft thought - or assumed - that Nokia understood about power consumption issues on smartphones. They've now discovered that Nokia don't understand. It was *Symbian* who understood. And Nokia and Symbian were not actually the same company.

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I weep for MS Research

I work on exactly that problem and all MS have done is paired away any processing, created a small mono display and said in 10 years this is were we'll be at.

Anybody could produce that, the hard part is adding colours, converting the path into a vector, grouping, handwriting recognition and other actual useful things in that 100ms that is the big problem.

In 10 years time processors and buses will have improved enough to make existing software do all that processing in 10ms.

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Re: Whuh?

On the other hand, getting the lag time down to 1 ms would be pretty impressive, but when was the last time you saw a 1000hz display, even without a touchscreen?

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Win9 prediction

MS drops Metro and goes with the interface in this clip. You can still call up the Desktop by drawing it all with your finger.

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Erm...

Isn't this Microsofts standard model? Bloated code and wait for the hardware to catch up?

Wintel was a great little civil partnership, each drove the others business. However now Microsoft are also seeing other people, they (Microsoft) can't drive the show so much anymore. Their new Beaus have other things to consider like power draw etc. So Microsoft has to flirt again, not be the demanding Alpha partner.

I just don't see Ballmer or any of his team as the chocolates and flowers gang. I think they are more of the "Right, bend over..." mindset.

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