25Sep / 2006

Interacting with the world….

The other day OJ posted about a video on YouTube, depicting an interface that comes close to resembling what you see in Minority Report… you know, with the interface made from projected light? I’d seen this movie in the past myself, and was excited by the possibilities it offered for new interfaces and interactive moments.

I didn’t think much more of it, until yesterday, when it was also mentioned in a book im currently reading : Everyware. A very interesting book, talking about the impact of ubiquitous computing and challenging some assumptions being made with regards to things like interface design and interactions.

It made me think again about the interface supposed by the video on YouTube. It reinforced the truth that with whatever direction we go with technology, there needs to be a lot of effort put in by you and me now, to make sure that what we do is accessible by everyone in the future. This is not to remove all creativity from design and communication, but merely suggesting that for all the bells and whistles that we could possibly have, I think it’s important that we choose the right bell for the right occasion.

I think the future of interaction will be successfull if the technology behind it is able to dissolve into the background – leaving only the communication (in whatever form).

I may be getting too existential for this little blog… but if you’ll indulge me, I think it might be a very interesting conversation to have – especially when we don’t really know what devices may be around in 20 years…

Anyway, as part of this continuous discussion, tomorrow I head off to WebDirections 2006 at UTS. I’ll be attending Designing for Interaction, and will let you know how it goes.

Posted in Design

Tags: ,

Permalink 2 Comments

  • http://rant.blackapache.net OJ

    Interesting post Danny. I’ve been thinking alot recently about how I interact with my machine, particularly in my daily life as a developer. One of the things I’ve stated on my rant is my frustration at how slow it feels to input my thoughts. I’ve been searching for a way to get my ideas down faster so that I can increase my productivity.

    I’ve been playing with various text editors in the hope that I’m going to find one that will allow me to move around and make my changes at a far greater speed than the standard text editors you find out there (that includes Notepad++, UltraEdit and Visual Studio’s editor). As I’ve said in my blog, VIM is the closest thing I’ve found to what I’m looking for. It’s not easy to learn, but when you finally start getting comfortable with it you can really feel a difference. Anyway, I digress…

    What I’m alluding to is that part of my frustration is dealing with a keyboard! When you sit back and think about it, a keyboard is a pretty primitive way of interacting with a computer, and your fingers can only move so fast across a layout that was initially designed to slow people down. It’s definitely time to move past it.

    I don’t think that voice recognition is the next step. Current implementations of voice recognition are very good, but I don’t think they are (currently) viable replacments for the humble keyboard. We need to find another way.

    The input device shown in that YouTube video looks pretty interesting. I’d be keen to see how you’d interact with it when playing games, browsing the web and doing some form of text editing or word processing – since these are the kind of things that most people would be doing when sitting in front of their machines. I think it’d come back to the virtual keyboard and that’s how you’d get through most of the standard activities which really doesn’t bring us any closer to a better way of getting our thoughts down.

    Let’s hope that someone somewhere is breaking ground in this area :)

  • Pingback: You wish you were here… / shiftperception.006 blog » Designing for interaction…