Catching up with the Future
By Mat Morrison August 5th, 2006
In Stories
Bill Gates famously pointed out that “we always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.” I’ve been focused on the two year future for so long that sometimes the ten year future creeps up on me.
Our friend Simon Oliver draws our attention to footage from the recent TED conference of Jeff Han’s multi-touch interface that allows fine-tuned gestural interaction with information. Imagine the “Minority Report” interface, and you’re close to understanding what this is about. Watch the video, and you’ll understand properly.
You can see that this is a step change in usability (as Mr Han keeps saying, “the interface disappears”). Talking about a virtual keyboard, Han points out “there’s no reason in this day and age that we should be conforming to a physical device — these interfaces should be conforming to us.”
I guess that Simon’s interest is predominantly in games design, and how the new interfaces will free game play: Simon’s done a lot of work in this area. And you can see what this gestural interface would bring to experimental new interfaces like the lovely flash implementation at crafts-market Etsy. But for me, the idea of being able to manipulate data gesturally (not the clumsy mouse gestures offered by browsers like Opera and Firefox) makes me rather weak with anticipation.
1 Leo // Aug 10, 2006 at 3:52 pm
I shared this with a friend who works in interface design and he pointed me to this video of BumpTop’s 3D physics-driven desktop
Looking the 3d desktop it seems to me that the interface is limited by using only one of the five ways of organising infromation; location. A mnemonic for the five is LATCH (Location, Alphabetic, Type, Chronology and Hierarchy) which was coincidentally taught to me by Richard Wurman , the founder of the TED conferences.
Hopefully these literal desktops don’t preclude using the other four methods of organising information because if if I ‘lose’ a file I have enough trouble locating the damn thing using search - let alone trying to remember where I left it physically. Which is obviously why I lost it in the first place.
2 Mat // Aug 18, 2006 at 11:40 am
I’m not convinced by Bumptop’s effort, either. It looks to me as though I’d have to learn a whole load of (fairly accidental) gestures. And, of course, it’s a single-touch interface.
I’m playing around with this interface from Tactile 3-D. It’s like a cyberpunk nightmare. I’ve uploaded a screen capture of a session (apologies for poor rendering).
All of this reminds me of a fairly throwaway article from Wired in the early-mid nineties. As I recall, the article mentioned Elizabethan memory theatres, and mediaeval cloisters; pointing out that human memory - evolved to deal with the dimensions of real space - remembers where things are.
That, as a result, the hierarchical “folders and drawers” systems we use to file and regiment information are artificial, and that we’d do much better if we placed things in an artificial 3-space.
As I recall, the opportunity was to persuade VCs that one was creating a filing system based on the Doom engine. I’ll try to find the article.
Sadly, of course (and as demonstrated in the video I uploaded), adding a third dimension adds “distance”; distance takes time to travel, and all that does is add time to a task. I’m not saying that time is the be-all and end-all of usability (although it’s pretty close), but (to me) these 3-D systems add complexity, decrease usability, and don’t add very much at all.