
The Future of UI - chuhnk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6YTQJVzwlI
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sdfx
These new UI concepts are always awe inspiring, but what is really the benefit
of using them?

One of the most popular demonstrations is browsing through a bunch of photos
on a huge screen with large gestures. While this looks quite impressive it's
inaccurate when performing specific tasks (e.g. the color-selection planes in
the video), the gestures are limited and you have to learn somewhat
unintuitive ones apart from the more obvious "select", "move left" and "zoom"
gestures. His more real world example (the table and the globe) didn't quite
work, but what he could show us wasn't a step up from using a mouse.

An other favorite is the "physical elements on a table" example. This works
reasonable well but his examples again were not convincing. Using it as a wind
tunnel without being able to rotate it in three dimensions? Calculating the
shadows of buildings?

But what's holding us back? Processing power? Cost? Hardware requirements? Or
a general lack of use cases, of areas where this really makes sense?

~~~
hop
Their incentive is to make it look cool, wow an audience, and bring more grant
money to the MIT Media Lab. Contrast this with a company that puts the pieces
together and ships a useful product - like the iPad UI...

I always thought crazy concept cars were a waste of time and resources for car
companies. If they instead focused on massive in-house iteration (like Apple's
10-3-1 prototyping process), better cars would be brought to market.

~~~
andreyf
_like the iPad UI_

Imagine a 60 inch iPad hanging on the wall of your kitchen. Imagine being able
to point and gesture instead of touching. Want to watch a movie while cooking?
Switch back to the cook-"book" app when it's time to add the next ingredient,
then go back to your film.

~~~
angrycoder
A 60 inch iPad I could see. But multitasking? Thats just crazy talk.

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fjabre
Everybody seems to be stuck on hand gestures and arm movement for the future,
but while this looks cool I wonder just how comfortable it is to keep you arms
waving about like that for hours on end. Also, it's hard to argue that 3D is
always superior to 2D when presenting information. In some cases 2D is more
than sufficient.

I also wonder why there isn't more talk about _Brain–computer interfaces_. It
seems to me that the most natural UI is one that can be navigated just by
thinking. It might be little Borg-like but I can't imagine HCI going in any
other direction long-term.

*[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain%E2%80%93computer_interfac...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain%E2%80%93computer_interface)

~~~
inimino
Physical inactivity (sitting at your desk all day moving only your fingertips)
is implicated in many of the health problems most hackers are likely to suffer
from and eventually die from. I think many of us would welcome the opportunity
to stand up and move around a bit while still getting our work accomplished,
even if it wasn't the only interface we used.

BCIs, on the other hand, would mean you can potentially finish that software
module, or at least read your email, while simultaneously going for a run
...as long as you don't run into a tree or the road.

~~~
donw
I'm going to vote for no on that; at least for me, running takes a lot of
focus, to the point where ditching the iPod helped me become a stronger
runner. I had always run with music before, but I found that if I focused on
the run itself, I could push myself harder.

Weightlifting and climbing work the same way, in my experience, and I can't
imagine that my limited martial arts training would have been any better if I
had something else to focus on other than not getting punched in the face.

Our society is obsessed with trying to do everything at once, rather than
giving full focus to each activity in turn. Personally, I'd rather that
technology reduce the busy work, so that we can focus more directly on each
activity, rather than trying to amalgamate them together all the time.

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musclman
Sure, it looks cool, but it appears to require a lot of slow and inefficient
physical movement to accomplish the most basic of tasks. Imagine a bunch of
cubical works sitting at their desktops waving their arms around trying to
navigate their computer's file system :-)

~~~
uptown
Here's a video demo of Project Natal in use that looks exhausting.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm0KKa6wACQ>

~~~
JesseAldridge
Holy Christ. The game seems designed to make people look like spastic dorks.

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tgandrews
The moving physical objects makes sense, touch makes sense. Learning a series
of gestures to manipulate data on a screen makes less sense to me than a
mouse.

The mouse is movement and control, the gestures need you to hold your hands in
strange positions and move within a field of view (what the camera can see).
An improved design will need to be intuitive.

~~~
Scriptor
The brain is able to make itself think that external tools are mere extensions
of the body, so it's no surprise that the mouse has been successful. I wonder
if the lack of any tactile response in these interfaces hinders them somewhat
or if it's all the same for the brain.

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johnthedebs
"It has to be for every human being...It's been 25 years. Can there really be
only one interface? There can't."

I love that, and I totally agree. I think what we're going to see in the
future is applications that primarily use the interfaces they're best suited
for with fallbacks to other less well-suited interfaces.

Is this going to be the future for every application? No way. The same way
touch-based interfaces aren't the future for every application. But (as with
any demo) he's only scratching the surface here and I believe that a UI which
matches the way we _already think about things_ has some huge implications.

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treblig
At the end he mentions "[In 5 years time,] when you buy a computer, you'll get
this."

I think that's about 5 years too soon on that one. Incredible demonstrations
though... awesome to see science fiction become reality.

~~~
stcredzero
All you need is a large display and a webcam. Isn't Microsoft already doing
this for gaming? The enhanced resolution Wii controller with a large
flatscreen already has most of this capability.

~~~
evo_9
Yes Microsoft is releasing Project Natal (rumored to b renamed Wave)for the
Xbox this September. It uses a similar array of cameras to track multiple
users for gaming and it can be used to navigate the 360's Ui.

Should be interesting for gaming, but just as in general computing application
this type of control mechanism isn't suited as a complete replacement for a
mouse or a joystick.

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bruceboughton
I find the conclusion of the talk hard to swallow: that these sort of
interfaces will be common in the computer you buy 5 years from now.

Why? This goes against the current major trend in the industry: mobilisation /
pocket-isation. It is inconceivable that our built environments will have the
required sensors, projectors, etc. to enable these interfaces. Even more than
that, our computing is becoming ever more mobile. Computing has to fit our
environment, not the other way round.

Maybe this stuff is the future, but it's certainly not the near future and I
didn't really see much value in the interfaces demoed.

Then again, the point of R&D is to discover what doesn't work as much as what
does and you can't do that without realising your ideas.

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est
I saw similar demo from Microsoft Surface and MIT Sixth Sense

~~~
RevRal
The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology:
[http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/pranav_mistry_the_thrillin...](http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html)

I haven't seen the one by Microsoft. I really recommend watching this, it's
pretty intense.

~~~
daralthus
The potential is, that these applications react to the world you are in. For
example the knowledge that there are products on the shelf and I want the
cheapest and the best. The other thing, that I don't need to carry a camera, a
phone, a book, a laptop, an ipod or like paper, pencil, wallet, puppy, drum,
guitar, tv, different looking shirt, shoe, wallpaper... So many things could
be virtual. (I mean augmented with the real world.)

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daralthus
This is still 2d. You can't interact in 3d if it is just projected in 2d. He
is just pointing and flying. You don't have to fly between documents if you
have a real 3d augmented reality. Apps would be like real 3d objects, you can
touch them, manipulate their shapes like you do it with your keyboard or a
door-knob, the only difference is that they won't be from real material. So
they won't have phisical boundaries, if not programmed that way. (It just
depends on the needs.) I want to make a demo on it, is there somebody who want
to join?

~~~
bruceboughton
It's quite a scary thought that with a truly 3D/AR computing experience, we
might not be able to tell which elements of our environment are Real World and
which are virtual.

Imagine a virus that injects fake flooring into your vision where instead
there is a 40ft fall!

~~~
daralthus
wow, how cool crime sci-fi would that be.. But there are always good and bad
things in a new technology. Imagine all that junk that can be saved with
virtual stuff when people buy the new and throw away the old.

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Tycho
I'm not so sure about all'a'dat (although I do remember thinking the stuff in
Minority Report was awesome, years ago) but I can see a need for 3D/depth
augmentation of standard desktop interfaces. I want to be able to tuck windows
away 'in the distance' or twist them round to a slanted pane (so they take up
a fraction of the space but are still more or less visible/legible). I also
want to step in and out of '3D mode' when making ER diagrams or UML diagrams
and such, for when there's too many criss-crossing lines.

Undoubtedly these things have already been tried (I saw a nice Linux demo
somewhere, years ago, with 3D windows) but I'd like them standardized, and
touch-operated. It'd make a big difference IMO.

Periodically when using a cluttered interface I mutter 'this is why the need
for 3D is so great' and my colleagues laugh at me. But I'm only half joking.

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koeselitz
"We didn't have networks at all at the time of the MacIntosh's introduction."
Seriously? Seems like that estimation might be about fifteen years off to me.

Edit to say: In fact, he's an intelligent and well-versed enough guy that I'm
sort of puzzled by this remark. Does anyone know what Mr Underkoffler means
when he says that networks weren't around then? I think he must have something
different in mind than I do.

~~~
inimino
I presume "we" there means the general market to which the Mac was introduced.
Ubiquitous Internet access was years away.

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ghempton
He kind of fumbles on the question of "what is the killer app?" You'd think it
would be on the tip of his tongue considering how long hes been working on
this...

That said, there really needs to be more open source software to enable this
front. I think we will really see some innovation once a hacker can take a $10
webcam and and open source lib and start creating software with these types of
user interfaces.

~~~
davidalln
A lot of this has been done with openFrameworks (<http://openframeworks.cc/>).
It ties together a plethora of open source frameworks including OpenCV with
easy to use bindings to indirectly create a somewhat simplified version of
C++. If you YouTube openFrameworks, you'll get a lot of demos demonstrating
this technology using free libs.

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pedrokost
What i really hate about operating systems is that they the same as they were
in the beginning. THe only thing that changed was the visual appearance. We
still have a taskbar, a desktop,etc. Can't someone reinvent how operating
systems work?

~~~
pmarin
<http://cm.bell-labs.com/plan9/>

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frou_dh
I respect the chops of those creating these things but I just don't feel like
I'd want to use them daily. Perhaps I'm already locked in to a legacy mindset
by my mid 20s!

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ryanjmo
This talk seems like a whole bunch of 3-D snake oil.

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elblanco
Nice first effort, but after watching all I can think is:

arms = tired

looks like a clumsy, highly particular and low volume way to sift through data

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donaq
5 years seems way too optimistic for this stuff to appear in consumer
products. I'm betting no.

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georgieporgie
The gestures presented in the video look like a creative way to replace the
tendinitis in my wrists with a variety of shoulder, neck, and hip issues.

I think the most compelling UI development in recent years is the Wii remote.
Motion sensitivity _and_ IR pointing in one device, and it's in the hands of
consumers, conditioning them to expect a new level of interaction. Like
everything we thought the PowerGlove would be, but without the fanfare or bad
movie.

I anticipate laptops with multiple cameras built-in for better sensing of
gestures and eye movements. In fact, I think I'm going to pick up an extra
webcam or two and play around with just that...

