Extreme Tomato

And so begins my presentation: LucidTouch. The flimsy pretext of this device is expressed glibly in the quote on the front page, the irony being that the rest of this presentation does nothing more than contradict this statement.

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Ok, moving onto the next slide we see the basic idea: touch screens, it seems, are cool, and nothing excites Microsoft research scientists more than the prospect of being able to sell their prepackaged cool gadgets to millions of irksome brats. If only it were not for the fact that the awesomeness of touchscreens is muted by the omnipresent 'fat finger problem'.

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It seems the more sausage-fingered lard-arses of this world are cursed by an inability to select the modestly-sized items on a standard touchscreen and so must resort to some kind of stick, commonly referred to as a stylus. Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, has chosen to ditch the stylus in favour of said fat fingers, this time used in a different arrangement of clammy groping.

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The way they aim to accomplish this is, wait for it, to put your hands behind the screen, as if this further level of indirection will somehow call demons from the earth to position your fingers for you.

Quite plainly there is a small problem with this, and the obvious solution is to make the device transparent such that users can once more see their fat fingers, only now they have cursors on them. Apparently this eliminates the myriad of problems that stem from those pesky digits either obscuring vast portions of the screen or flailing around grasping indiscriminately for that small 'close' button whilst 4chan loads slowly in front of your mother-in-law.

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But all of this theory pales into insignificance when people stopped to consider that they didn't actually know how to make the thing transparent anyway and had to invent two separate ways of doing it in order to justify their research grant. Their solutions are outlined currently on the board, the latter being chosen due to its configurability and superiority when compared to the comparatively child-like simplicity of the first method, which rolls around on the floor trying desperately to pronounce common nouns and dribbling over itself whilst its peer solves differential equations, theory of monkey eating syndrome and rubiks' cubes .

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We come down from this veritable crescendo of theoretical insight with a crash as the harsh reality of life forces its way into the ivory tower and starts eyeing up the DVD player. It would appear that, given the current state of technology today, the best human kind can do is a webcam attached to a stick, which is crudely rammed into the back of a small screen.

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Whilst this may appear a woefully inadequate approximation of a sensor network it suffers from only two main flaws: 1) that the image people see is of the back of their own hands, and , familiar though this may be it is not useful and 2) that moving your hands away from you makes them bigger. A third crippling factor is introduced when you consider that the machine driving it all runs windows XP and thus manages to cram a full ice age of delay between every movement.

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And so we move languidly onto the actual uses for this thing. Whilst the very existence of this section is under debate the original developers claim it surpasses the usefulness of obvious parallel items including chocolate fireguards and teapots. To further labour their point they have developed a series of counter-intuitive input methods seemingly designed to confuse and annoy in equal measure.

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As if these have not made themselves apparent earlier I am now required by convention to cover the inadequacies of the design, though at this point it feels like not only stealing candy but also smashing it back into the infant's face. To begin with one must note that the range of finger movement is greatly reduced over a normal touchpad. This is due to a kind of crab leg formation where every finger argues with the others in a gladiatorial struggle for control over the screen area, in the end being tossed aside to flail limply off the edge.

There is then the issue that merely holding the device occludes more area than did the original finger pointing technique, as it would seem that the desgners have a vendetta against handles of any form, instead opting to filmsily grip the thing between the palms.

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On the assumption you can go a whole session without the need to drink coffee, pick anything up or scratch your nose, it may actually be possible to use these devices for something other than moving squares around and zooming in on low-resolution msn maps. I have to say at this point that trying to come up with uses for this thing was itself a challenge on a similar scale to attempting to placate an enraged bull as it cheerily gores a bunch of ridiculously clad halfwits in the streets of Pamplona.