Displays are getting larger and larger. This Reuters article moots cheap large displays in the near future. I wonder if soon, we’re going to see the desk that is simply a display under a sheet of glass? Sure, at $3000 it will be executive level at first, but prices should tumble.
What you’re talking about are tabletop interfaces which I was working on for a previous project. Tabletop computers are great for a lot of things but there’s also a lot of challenges to getting them working effectively.
Tables are great for collaborative work. You can have 2, 4, 10 people all clustered around a single tabletop computer working on a common goal. If you’ve ever noticed how awkward it is to get even 2 people using a single desktop computer and all the pointing and handing over of mice and keyboards is, tables are going to revolutionise how we work together. Tables are great for spatial and especially geospatial information. Playing with google earth on a 100" table is lots of fun and it drastically improves your productivity.
However, one of the big things holding tabletop interfaces back is that you can’t just port desktop applications over to a table and expect them to work seamlessly. Mice and keyboard on a table suck frankly. Theres no nice place to put them and you can’t keep track of a mouse cursor on a huge screen. What are effective tabletop manipulation techniques are whats termed direct interaction. Touch based, pen based, pointing, speech etc, right on the surface. With a mouse, all parts of the screen can be reached equally easily (with the exception of the sides and corners) so the prime real estate is around the edges of the screen. The taskbar, menus, close buttons, scroll bars, they’re all on the sides of your screen. With direct interaction, the sides of the screen are annoying to get to. The most valuable real estate is the stuff closest to you. Within about a 50cm/2 foot radius of your torso. Anything outside of this range, you have to reach to get to.
The other big thing which I think is going to kill tables, and this is purely my personal opinion and is not reflected in the field, is that nobodys really figured out a decent way to do text entry on them. The keyboard is an amazing device which is specially built for the entry of text. Nothing we’ve built before or since then comes close to matching the speed and accuracy of the keyboard for entering text, not handwriting, not speech, probably not even brain-computer interfaces. The problem is, where do you put a keyboard on a tabletop computer? You have a fixed 50cm radius of comfortable reach. A keyboard plunked into the middle of that effectively covers about 50% of that prime real estate. Anybody who’s tried virtual keyboards knows what a pain in the ass they are if you try and use them for more than 5 minutes. That tactile feedback is important. My personal belief is that this issue has been grossly underappreciated by all alternative interface designers. Sure, tables are great for specialised purposes and in niche applications but my personal feeling is that because it simply can’t enter in huge gobs of text, it’s never ever going to replace the standard desktop form factor.
This is what I love about the Dope: there are the oddest and most interesting experts around.
Why not have a slide-out keyboard along one (or more) of the edges that can be pulled out when you need it, and tucks right back under the table when you don’t? Doesn’t seem that debilitating.
Nothing like Shalmanese is talking about but…one of my college profs had his monitor (CRT) under his desk. I believe it was at an angle and that somehow made it easier to see.
He was a law prof and had a teeny tiny office stuffed with heavy oldschool furniture, so he just didn’t have the room for something as large as a CRT. I always thought that was pretty swank.
I wonder if he’s upgraded to flatscreen now or has stuck with this…
The real question is whether or not a flat-panel writing desk is more or less like a raven than a standard writing desk.
More, because it’s frequently refreshed.
…and there’s a "B’ in both, but not in all three.
Or conversion of stylus writing into text, like on a PDA?
I’m glad I’m not the only one whose mind immediately went there.
Because then you still need to leave enough room between you and the table to slide out the keyboard and use it comfortably which cuts into your usable reach. Unless you want to be shuffling back and forth in your chair every time you wanted to use a keyboard. Could work, who knows. Quite frankly, nobody’s tried it yet. The field is still very young and everybody is trying out their own unique mix of hardware and software.
It’s hard to fully appreciate just how slow handwriting is, even in ideal circumstances. Add in the use of a stylus, waiting for the handwriting to text conversion and correcting the inevitable errors and even a virtual keyboard is faster.
You’ve totally lost me.
It’s from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland – one of the unanswerable riddles asked by the Mad Hatter at the Mad Tea Party: “Why is a Raven like a Writing Desk?” He didn’t have an answer at the timer, although he came up with one later, and so have lots of other people. See any of the editions of Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice for details.
The first thing at least three of us thought of when we saw the thread title (how often do you see “writing desk” anymore?). I came in to post, but Athena beat me to it, so I had to give an answer instead. Mine is in the styler of Lewis Carroll’s own.
Really, the answer might be a kind of futuristic-looking panels. You could put some pressure on the panels or push in two or three places (in order to make it so a bouncing ball or a cat can’t necessarily do it) to make the panels spin around an axis. So it’d be like the keyboard (or half of one, the other half being in another panel, also ergonomically placed) is on the underside of the panel and it flips around, exposing it and pointing it upwards.
Of course, then you open yourself to some mechanical failures with the mechanism, but we’ll assume that we can get at it very easily and make good repairs cheaply and quickly.
Since Poe did not write on a flat-panel writing desk, the answer is “less”.
One other weakness of tabletop displays, as well as embedded monitors in desk systems - they’re a really unhealthy seating position.
Workstation ergonomics is a very healthy field of research, as companies become very fearful of lawsuits from employees who can claim their work environment has damaged their health. If you have a look at any of the guidelines for this, you’ll see that it’s recomended that the monitor is kept at eye level. For instance:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/healthy_living/health_at_work/physical_workstations1.shtml
“A good guide to positioning is to place the monitor about an arm’s length away. The top of the screen should be roughly at eye level”
Oh, and one other important problem. Where are you going to put your coffee?
Ah, but nor did Carroll.
I was thinking the same thing, except I didn’t really have any cites to back it up.
Here is an interesting article about research into optimal seating position. I found it interesting because I’ve always sat how they describe as healthy.
As I type now, I’m leaned back, and my feet are resting on the top of my “desktop” which is actually under my deck.
Clearly, a reclined seating position doesn’t really jive with a table-top display, unless the table top was actually shifted into the vertical position. 
I bet a table top display is good for war rooms in movies, though.
Every war film I’ve seen shows that coffee and ashtrays are a requirement for such things, along with piles of paper strewn across desks. There you are watching simulations of the tank division rolling across asia, and you have to pause the thing to stack papers on the floor and wipe coffeemug rings off.
I also see a problem for fans of the internet’s most popular category of website. Bad enough when someone talks about spraying coffee over their monitor…
I don’t get this. If you look at traditional pen & paper interaction, then your display surface is exactly where a tabletop interface would be. Maybe the vertical screen is more ideal but it seems like the horizontal interface is one that we use commonly. Building jigsaw puzzles, writing letters, reading textbooks etc. In all cases, we are in the exact same ergonomic position. Also, some researchers are experimenting with tiltable tables that can go from fully horizontal to fully vertical. Somewhere on the order of 15 - 45 degrees actually works out to be the optimum display angle, depending on the task.
However, there are many legitimate ergonomic problems with tabletop devices. Theres an excellent presentation (pdf) that goes into a lot of this stuff. One of the big ones has to do with lighting. Office lighting is designed to minimize glare on vertical surfaces at the expense of maximising it on horizontal ones. Many tabletop researchers have had big problems with glare on tables and have had to rely on homebrew lighting solutions just to get an acceptable viewing surface.
I don’t know if this was a frivolous comment or not but this actually is a huge unresolved issue. In the last year or so, researchers have come to realise that it’s virtually impossible to keep people from piling crap onto tables. Any table just seems to accumulate debris no matter how many signs they post up or policies they enact. Nobody has a good solution to this problem yet. This issue particularly affects touch based tables because of the problem of inadvertant touches. With traditional single-touch touchscreens like you would see at a museum exhibit, this was never much of a problem as you just tracked the primary touch point but if you have a multi-touch screen like Jeff Han’s (youtube video), then what you end up getting is a lot of brushes from the side of your hand, your elbow, clothing etc. How to deal with that is still a huge unresolved problem and adding foreign objects like coffee cups into the mix as well is going to be a horrendously complicated problem.
One relatively neat solution I’ve seen is to just accept piles of crap as inevitable. They use a top projected image so images will be shown on top of all of your crap. All you have to do is turn over the top piece of paper on your pile of crap and then you can use the white background to display something.