Savant Systems is a home automation company that sells a range of wireless control tablets that may illustrate how Apple’s tablet will work in the real world.
Unlike the endless mockups and magazine-publisher demos, Savant’s line of Rosie Touch systems are real products.
Based on OS X, the Rosie Touch panels control the home’s heating, lighting, security and entertainment systems. They run an iPhone-like touch interface based on a photo-realistic model of the house’s interior. Built on pictures of the actual home, the UI allows users to control the lights and AV components by interacting with pictures of the actual components onscreen.
In other words, tap the hallway light onscreen, and the actual hallway light turns on or off. Slide your finger down the picture of the kitchen window, and the blinds in the kitchen are drawn down.
The company dispatches a professional photographer to take pictures of the customer’s home. The pictures are used to create the TrueImage control interface.
“Instead of interacting with confusing icons, TrueImage allows you to simply touch the actual light or shade in that room,” the company says. “Not only does the light in the room turn on or dim (if you press and hold the represented light), but it also illuminates on the touch panel confirming your command.”
Check out this short video below of the system in action.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYlRL95gEjY
Other rooms in the house are represented by pictures in a scroll bar at the bottom. If the user wants to control systems in another room, they simply swipe their finger across the screen until the room appears on the main screen.
The system couldn’t be simpler. There’s no learning whatsoever — it’s totally intuitive. A kid could wander into the house, pick up the tablet, and in seconds be controlling the lights or television.
The company also sells a mobile version for the iPhone/iPt. The TrueImage software is proprietary, but the company’s entire product line is based on Mac OS X — a very unusual distinction in the home automation industry. Most of Savant’s automation systems run on Mac Minis. From the specs, it looks like the Rosie Touch 13 is based on a 13-inch MacBook, while the Rosie Touch 20 & 24 Table Top Touch Panels are clearly iMac-based.
The TrueImage interface is an example of direct manipulation, a paradigm of human-compuetr interaction in which objects onscreen are manipulated directly. The iPhone’s “pinch to zoom” is a good example of direct manipulation.
In this case, the TrueImage UI is an extreme example — objects in the real world are represented by analogs onscreen.
But it’s a realworld example of how touch-based computing might look on a tablet. More and more, software will dispense with menus, windows and radio buttons, and instead have UIs that more closely resemble the real world. Consider Apple’s iLife software, which the company is rumored to be tweaking for the tablet. No doubt, operations like cropping, resizing and removing red-eye will be performed with your finger directly on the image.
Contrast this to Steve Ballmer’s demos of the Hewlett-Packard tablet at CES, where he tried to play a video but struggled to hit Windows 7’s tiny buttons and menu items with his fingers. No wonder Microsoft’s tablet PC strategy has failed. The company simply tried to shoehorn Windows into a different form factor with little attention to how a finger is different from a mouse.
If one thing is for sure, next week Steve Jobs will be demoing software that looks more like Savant’s TrueImage than Windows Media Player 12.
