A new face

In his article “User Interface—The next battlefield–Part 1,” Alvin Wong predicts that user interfaces and ease-of-use will become a consumer’s primary reason for selecting an electronic product (Ref. 1). In making his point, Wong argues that well-designed features will become ubiquitous. He points to the touch screen and speech recognition as the two interfaces that have replaces keyboards and mice.

Microsoft’s Rakesh Kumar goes a step further, predicting in “Wave hello to the natural user interface” that gestures have the potential to dominate how people command industrial system such as machines (Ref. 2). He also predicts that machine operators will be able to log in not with a user name and password, but with face recognition.

Most box test equipment still relies heavily on mechanical buttons or wheels as the primary user interface. Instruments such as oscilloscopes use a combination of knobs, buttons, and menus. Some bench oscilloscopes, particularly those with embedded PCs, let you add a keyboard or a mouse. Others also use touch screens that let you navigate menus. Some let you zoom in on a signal with a mouse or touch screen. Yet, all bench oscilloscopes have knobs because engineers have insisted on them.

Tablet computers and smart phones, with their touch screens, are at the beginning stages of showing us that they can be used to control instruments. Personally, I think the idea of using two fingers to zoom in on a waveform is too intuitive to ignore. I can envision an instrument where its entire user interface is a smart phone or tablet computer. The oscilloscope, meter, or other measurement system communicates over a wireless connection to the phone or tablet that you take with you.

Gesture control, now just starting to appear, could take instrument control to yet another level. Kumar opens by saying “By holding out a hand, palm forward, we can stop a group of people from approaching a dangerous situation; by waving an arm, we can invite people into a room.” With gesture control, you wouldn’t have to reach across your bench to a front panel to change an instrument setting. Eliminating the reach would minimize the chance that you’d accidentally disturb the test setup. For some of us, eliminating that reach could literally save our backs.

For automated test systems, especially those used in production where touch screens are common, a gesture or voice-recognition interface could, as Kumar noted, reduce the maintenance costs of cleaning or repairing touch screens. But, gestures, words, and accents vary widely. A gesture that’s common in one culture is offensive in another. Different cultures, even different parts of the same country, use different words for he same thing. For example, a highway on the east coast is a freeway on the west coast. A rotary in New England is a roundabout everywhere else. The software will need much refining and customization.

All of these alternative user interfaces have the potential for use with test equipment. But old habits die hard, and it could be many years before anything replaces knobs and buttons. And because test equipment has a long life compared to consumer products, by the time your bench instrument is ready for a new face, that face itself may be obsolete.