

Ubuntu - Getting physical - Uncle_Sam
http://design.canonical.com/2010/09/getting-physical/

======
antileet
It was an interesting proof of concept. I'm not sure how much the parallax-
correction or full-screen toggling would help but there seem to be many more
possibilities. This is a great opportunity for Canonical or other developers
to build in a gesture-recognition framework which other developers can plug
into and build applications.

Think about it - a gesture can mute the sound, so you don't need to pause the
music when a phone call comes in. Get up and leave, and the screen will lock
itself. Stick out your tongue and it'll check your email. Heck, I'm sure soon
enough Ubuntu will detect your face seeming sad during debugging sessions and
automatically shows kitten pictures (Emacs probably does this already, I'm not
sure).

~~~
sdfx
Yes, this way of interacting with your pc could be a nice addition to existing
ways like touch or voice recognition, particularly if this is part of a system
wide framework. Locking your screen when you are not in front of it (and
eventually logging you back on as soon as your face is detected) could be a
not too invasive first step in this direction.

Instead of me waving my hands to mute the sound I'd prefer the microphone to
pick up my ringtone and mute itself. From a technical point of view, this all
is possible for a couple of years now, no? So what's the reason why this
wasn't implemented earlier? Maybe people find running a webcam all the time
too invasive or the concepts too unintuitive?

~~~
antileet
Remember when voice recognition was all the rage? I remember when I was
younger and some kid on the block got a copy of some voice recognition
software. Plus, he was the only one with a computer with horsepower to run it.
Anyways, we all sat down and tried to train it - given the fact that we were
in India and our accent isn't very easily understandable by most humans, let
alone computers - we did see some results.

That kid would have the time of his life saying "Open solitaire" loudly and
clearly into the microphone a gazillion times, and the system would interpret
it as "delete my homework" or "email grandma all my private files".

All this seems pretty neat, but when it comes to just getting a little work
done - I'm still skeptical about how much advantage touch, motion, gestures,
speech, etc will help.

I am very excited about gaze tracking though. I don't think it's too long
before I can switch from one window to another by just looking at it and
twitching my eye.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
> I don't think it's too long before I can switch from one window to another
> by just looking at it and twitching my eye.

Most X11 window managers support the option for Focus Follows Mouse, where
simply hovering over a different window will make it the active window, and
after a short delay, bring it to the front of the window stack if necessary.
Just combine this with "Multi Pointer X" and a gaze tracking camera that acts
as another mouse input, and you could have what you're looking for...

~~~
Pistos2
I'm pretty sure I would want things to happen more or less only when I take
some action with my hands (gaze AND click/keypress). Things opening, closing,
raising, lowering, or otherwise flying around purely on the basis of my gaze
would probably be disorienting, or there would be a lot of false positives.
("I don't WANT that window to raise!")

~~~
nitrogen
Windows don't raise unless clicked. They only take keyboard focus when
hovered. Of course, desktop environments like Gnome and KDE don't do this
anymore by default, to accommodate the converts from Windows and MacOS.

Edit: the focus-stealing prevention already built into window managers could
be combined with the gaze tracking to allow you to type into one window while
reading from another.

------
scrrr
I think Ubuntu first needs to brush up on its desktop-ui. There's still many
little annoyances.

For my use-case (dev + web) it's superior to Windows, but it's no OSX yet. And
it wouldn't take that much to make it awesome.

Example from 10 Seconds ago: Resizing the browser-window. I had to use ALT +
Middle Mousebutton, because otherwise the resize-area in the corner is too
small.

~~~
patrickaljord
> I think Ubuntu first needs to brush up on its desktop-ui.

You know a company can work on more than one thing at the time.

To stay on topic, this demo looks pretty cool to me.

~~~
antileet
> You know a company can work on more than one thing at the time.

I too feel that they need to experiment and push the envelope forward. But
Canonical doesn't seem to have _that_ many developers that they can focus on
too many items. Of course it's run by some very experienced people, and I'm
not one to complain. This seems more like a cool hack which can spawn off an
independent community project which might eventually become part of the
desktop.

~~~
pavs
They have a group of designer/developers specifically dedicated to UI
development. I remember mark saying that the changes will be incremental over
some time as they experiment and get feedback from community not drastic.

If you look back in the last 2 Ubuntu releases you will see there has quite a
bit of changes here and there, they all add up over time.

------
cabalamat
> _If the user moves further from the screen while a video is playing on the
> focused window, the video will go automatically to fullscreen._

No.

It shouldn't do this, I don't want this to happen. The computer should do what
I tell it to (making it go fullscreen is just one keypress FFS), not what it
thinks I want to do, because it'll inevitably get it wrong from time to time.

~~~
astine
Do you want your screen saver to turn on only when you click a button? There
are a number of behaviors that you want your computer to do automatically
without your input and a proximity sensor can help it do these things more
intelligently. If auto full-screening a video is not one of them, you can
always turn that off.

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jrockway
Good blog post. Good UI, maybe not.

For fullscreen video, I set "fs" in my .mplayer/config. For notifications
while I'm away from my computer, I use my phone. For seeing behind windows, I
simply don't allow windows to overlap. (How do I know if something is on
another desktop? I don't -- that's the window manager's job too. I press S-a
to spawn or go to emacs. I press S-s to go to a web browser (or create one). I
press S-d to go to the next urxvt. Instead of making my brain remember where
my apps are, or making my eyes look for them, I just let the computer do that
for me.)

Anyway, I guess these things make the computer seem "cooler", but I think they
all kill your productivity. Only show me notifications every 45 minutes unless
they are tagged as work and it's between 9-5. Manage my windows for me. Make
the video full screen if the content is longer than 1 minute. Then let me use
my 8 CPU cores for something other than popup boxes saying my friend is
online.

~~~
bad_user
> _For fullscreen video, I set "fs" in my .mplayer/config._

This is not intended for you.

------
liuliu
We are making web browser aware of gestures (<http://api.alii.tv/>,
<http://pprevolution.com>). For now it is still a plugin based technology
(only works on Windows and Mac), but we do plan to leverage Native Client to
make it more accessible.

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vlucas
> Fullscreen notifications > If the user is not in front of the screen, the
> notifications could be shown at > fullscreen so the user can still read them
> from a different location.

This sounds like an _excellent_ way to play pranks on co-workers. "Bob, your
shipment of Viagra has just arrived!". The trolling is on.

