Really? Your kitchen counter and car windshield are also both flat and glassy. Are you sure you don't love the iPad because it's a huge touchscreen controlled by software with virtually limitless capabilities, rather than because it's flat and glassy?
Superior to everything else that ever came before and that currently exists.
That's my point about you misunderstanding—the rant is explicitly about the future, as mentioned in the title and throughout the introduction.
Black-and-white film photography was superior to everything else that ever came before and that existed at the time. But it wasn't the grayscale that made it revolutionary. It's not the lack of tactile feedback that made the touchscreen revolutionary.
If the rant is supposed to be about the future, then IMO it spends too much time disparaging the present. I think it’s a stupid and pointless rant if the premise is “this isn’t the best it will get.” Duh? That’s like the ultimate straw-man.
But obviously the point of the rhetoric which I originally took issue with is stronger than simply “this is super awesome and amazing but we will eventually do better”.
Rhetoric like “permanent numbness” or claiming the experience has “no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing” is inaccurate aside from being hyperbolic.
In fact I’m comfortable stating that I’ve never felt more connected with or immersed in a map than on a sleek multi-touch display. Additional controls around the screen which I would have to move my hand to manipulate, or an attempt to shoehorn a haptic interface into that — honestly I believe it would only serve to mediate and therefore dampen the connection between user and map.
A globe is haptic. But a globe lacks the affordances of multi-touch zooming. A digital globe that allowed zooming and panning, maybe even with a dynamic physical structure to represent topography, that would be fucking cool, but hardly portable. And so single purpose as to be a novelty.
The beauty of picture behind glass is how adaptable it is to any arbitrary task and how easily it can be reshaped and reformed, and new interaction modalities invented on the glass surface which are joyful and useful and efficient.
Haptic interfaces lock you in, they dictate function based on their form, they provide fixed manipulation points which can not rearrange to best suit the task at hand. As such, haptic interfaces given our current constraints on material science are often inferior and frustrating. Particularly for tasks which require dynamically adaptive coarseness and dynamic range of inputs, such as navigation.
Haptics are particularly difficult to allow users to manipulate interfaces through varying levels of acceleration and jerk, whereas the glass surface excels at this. Faster swipes, slower swipes, flicks, jabs, back and forth movements, and that’s all just one finger.
A click button is a one dimensional interaction point. Rarely is there a “click” affordance which measures harder or softer, except on “glass” type touchpoints.
The scroll wheels in the TM3 steering wheel is a great example of haptics striving to achieve this. The scrollwheel is awesome for fine grain incrementing and decrementing. But it’s also awesome because it has a “flick” mode where if you flick it fast the behavior changes in an interesting way!
For the right hand wheel, single clicks up and down increase and decrease cruise speed in 1 mph or kph increments. But a fast flick up or down (which may actually rotate the wheel 3 or 4 or 5 click points — who knows?) will move the cruise speed up to the next closest 5mph/kph increment (not up by exactly 5mph unless you were already divisible by 5).
This is a very neat HCI trick to provide a more usable scroll wheel. First, the fact that the wheel has click-points at approximately every 15 degrees (and the exact number of clicks per rotation is crucial based on the particular task!) rather than a smooth flowing wheel, translates naturally to integer changes in state.
Second, that it does have some concept of coarse vs fine-grained adjustments through the altered behavior when you flick it (likely triggered by at least 3 rapid clicks). But this all had to be very carefully designed into the hardware and firmware to make it all work for this particular task.
Third, because the particular task at hand doesn’t have a large dynamic range in the scale of the adjustments that need to be made. Rarely am I cruising at 20mph and then quickly find I want to be cruising at 80mph, or else the wheel would be terribly frustrating!
This is why trying to use the wheel (or really any haptic control) to pan or zoom a map is an exercise in total frustration. I know because that’s how my wife’s Mercedes tries to do it. Because sometimes I want to zoom out from a scale of 1mi on screen to 100mi on screen for a trip overview, and sometimes I just want to zoom from 1mi to 1.3mi to see the next turn. There are no obvious integer set-points to allow a haptic interface to lock on to, and the GPS interfaces which impose them tend to suck. The fact that I can’t directly address any arbitrary XY coordinate on the screen instantly compounds the frustration.
fixed manipulation points ... haptic interfaces [are often] inferior and frustrating ... There are no obvious integer set-points to allow a haptic interface to lock on to
This is exactly the kind of thing that the author of the rant called "haptic gimmicks", and is nothing like what the author favors over touchscreens. The author is talking about a dynamic physical interface, like this: https://rsnous.com/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/
For a map, not only is there an arbitrary XY coordinate that you want, but you can literally put your finger on it, so it lets you just place the selector there. Zooming should be continuous, so the dial has no click-points. "Flying" "down" or "up" (aka zooming in or out) feels like physical motion, with momentum, so the dial has a slight physical heft, and spins with some momentum.
But of course you wouldn't want to use this dial for everything, just like you've explained with such clarity as to why you wouldn't want to use a click-wheel for everything. That's why this interface is literally made of paper—building a different interface for a different application is as easy as literally cutting and pasting.
That’s like the ultimate straw-man.
Here's a similar one by LG, with a similarly high production value: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIRjytgNuhM
Here are more that appear to be by random designers/artists:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myB1L_NMLGQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SIhlWFAJWk
He's not disparaging the present, as he tried to make clear by having the word "future" in the title and then another 16 times in the post. He's disparaging a vision of the future that is disappointingly widespread.
Haptic interfaces ... provide fixed manipulation points
which can not rearrange to best suit the task at hand.
You know, like I mentioned in my very first reply to you?
> ... a map with purpose-built physical controls (not mouse + keyboard), but that is also dynamic (like a computer/tablet/smartphone). Maybe it'll be something like this: https://rsnous.com/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/
Maybe one day our devices will use nanobots to assemble any arbitrary per-app configuration of controls and gizmos and cranks and levers. But what exactly is the rant pitching in the meantime?