3D Touch Is Apple’s New Secret Weapon
3D Touch Is Apple’s New Secret Weapon :
I’m here to praise Apple again. Sorry. I have to do it. It’s not
in my contract nor am I paid to do it – imagine if we were! We’d be rich! – but
after manhandling the iPhone 6S Plus it’s abundantly clear that Apple has
discovered another breakthrough. And they are surprisingly nonchalant about it.
Apple’s first
interface breakthrough happened when it unleashed real multitouch on the world.
Until the original iPhone, screens reacted to one single point and often
required a stylus to operate. There were exceptions, but even after the iPhone launched competitors
couldn’t keep up and had to release resistive screen phones until they could
join in the multi-touch game.
This next
interface trick is far more subtle. By sensing pressure applied on the surface
of the Apple Watch, the new MacBook trackpad, and the new iPhones, Apple has
added a new layer to the touchscreen experience. In short, they have gone deep,
allowing us to move past surfaces and into more dynamic menu systems and even
UI tactics. As it stands 3D touch is pretty boring right now but imagine 3D
touching into an MRI scan or anatomy textbook. Imagine 3D touching through the
cosmos. Imagine 3D touching in games where you focus with a little pressure.
There is a clear reason Apple abandoned the moniker of “Force Touch:” what
their experience offers has less to do with force and a lot more to do with a
three dimensional experience.
3D Touch isn’t
an incremental update. It is a real tool and you can be sure that, by CES time,
manufacturers from Samsung to Xaomi will be offering stuff called Push Touch,
Deep Finger, and Insert UI for their phones. It is inevitable. And Apple had it
first.
This is not to
say I don’t appreciate what competitors have brought to the table. Samsung’s
Edge series is one of the most compelling and amazing screen technologies to
reach the market in a long time and many manufacturers are doing things with
materials and design that is to be commended. But none of them have released
anything that intrinsically changes how we, as humans, interact with the slabs
of glass and metal we hold in our pockets at all times. That’s a unique thing.
I’m not saying
Force Touch has changed the world. What it has done is tweak the world in a
very meaningful way. Apple’s products are starting to hit more senses. Thanks
to haptics the iPhone and the Apple Watch are able to tap into our nervous
system. In that case, Apple nuzzles us, offering a feather flick of
interaction. Interestingly, I’m already feeling “phantom taps” even when I wear
a mechanical watch, a sign that old Pavlov was right.
With 3D Touch,
The Apple devices ask us to touch them with a little more intent, to move past
the glass and into something deeper behind the surface. This is an important
change in how we use our phones and one sure to be successful. Of all of the
other improvements in these new phones, 3D Touch is the most compelling and it
is the one so subtle that Apple itself didn’t really talk it up during the
keynote or briefings. “By the way,” they seemed to say. “You can now stick your
finger through the phone. No big deal.”
Apple hasn’t
dented the universe in a while but they have tapped it with lots of force.
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