Hacker News Reader

Comment by analognoise | Hacker News Reader

I've heard the US Navy is going away from screens; they were a bad idea, cause a lot of confusion and they're reverting back to analog switchgear because of the tactile feedback.

Ugly but functional might be the way of the future!

View on HN

Touchscreens are just evil in any sort of physically involved environment, e.g. a car or even a kitchen stove. You can have ‘good-looking and functional’ (with physical controls too), but touchscreens in such a setup are rather ‘good-looking and dysfunctional’.

Game controllers are the perfect example of ergonomically-tuned physical controls with sleek looks. And afaik the US military uses Xbox controllers in drone control or something like that.

I'm just hoping this won't bite the Crew Dragon in the ass one day.

I hope one day we'll have shape-changing touchscreens which can grow physical buttons that can be pressed, and that could be operated without looking.

Something like a braille-capable touchscreen would already be a great improvement (concept art: [1][2])

This is technically 2.5D, and 3D would be even better (imagine a screen which can grow a joystick!).

While 3D-shape-shifting screens don't seem to exist even in SciFi, 2.5D displays are already being worked on, and would be a huge step up.

[1] https://www.yankodesign.com/2017/01/26/touchscreen-how-about...

[2] https://www.popsci.com/new-touch-screen-design-could-display...

I recall that there were some pretty long threads here after the US warship hitting some commercial vessel. The big issue wasn't using a screen but that the designers had taken advantage of having screens to create a multi-functional interface so one station could serve different functions, or functions could be moved between stations. Flexible, but confusing. I think the move is not to analog control, but back to single-purpose controls. Also, even if mechanical controls replace touchscreens, I'm sure that there will still be an optical encoder and field bus behind everything.

https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-i...

It was a really good read!

Why not physical analogue controls that are motorised like in some aeroplane controls. You can turn the dial, or the computer can turn the dial - and supposedly (737Max aside) allow physical control to override.

Being able to replace a physical station seems a great benefit in a warship.

I think of it this way: tactile controls for operation, read-only screens for situational awareness, touch or keyboard/mouse for configuration. Just don't put them on real-time critical paths.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com