My earliest introduction to touch screens (simply as an observer, not a user) came way back in the late 1970’s, in a research environment where they were being to used to control cyclotrons and other similar particle accelerators.
My immediate observation was how anti-ergonomic they were. The touch screen panels were mounted in a near-vertical panel in front of the operators face. The operator had to lift his arm to touch it. If there was a lot of operating to do or a lot of adjusting of things to do, the operator is holding his arm up in the air a lot. I can’t see how that is going to be comfortable for very long.
I see the same thing today in retail stores that use a touch screen. The cashier spends most of the time just shoveling items across the scanner, but must also poke buttons on the screen several times for each sale. They must have awfully sore or strong arms by the end of the day.
Some thoughts about touch screens and “glass cockpits” in the general-aviation or recreational-aviation arenas:
I had the opportunity for a few excursions (solely as a passenger in the back seat) in this airplane, a four-seater Beechcraft Sierra. It has a fairly elaborate auto-pilot that can even do such nifty stuff as fly and maintain an ILS (instrument landing system) holding pattern, all by itself. All kinds of controls, including navigation and communications, are all integrated.
Afterward, I asked the pilot: How much of this flight did you actually fly the airplane, and how much did Otto fly it? He said he flew the plane himself about 10% of the trip.
That seems to take all the fun out of it. People do recreational flying (e.g., the $100 hamburger trip) for the fun of it. Flying a mostly automated plane reduces the pilot to a glorified computer operator.
On one such trip, the aircraft owner was sitting in the back seat alongside me. At one point, the pilot wanted to adjust the engine fuel consumption parameters. The procedure entailed:
[ul][li] Asking the owner (in the back seat) to pull out the user manual from the back seat pocket.[/li][li] Flip through the pages to find the page with engine fuel parameters instructions.[/li][li] Read the instructions to the pilot.[/li][li] This in turn entailed navigating through several layers of menus, and fiddling with buttons and sliders and such on the touch screen.[/ul][/li]Just a glorified computer operator.
