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The Future of UI
- est 16y agoI saw similar demo from Microsoft Surface and MIT Sixth Sense
- RevRal 16y agoThe thrilling potential of SixthSense technology: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/pranav_mistry_the_thrillin... I haven't seen the one by Microsoft. I really recommend watching this, it's pretty intense.
- daralthus 16y agoThe 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.)
- what 16y agoThat's pretty amazing. He said it's easy to build and he wanted to open source the code, so that people can build their own. I hope he actually does.
- megaman821 16y agoThat is awesome. Using a projector is novel and as technology advances I could see that being replace by clear lcd glasses, contact lenses, and perhaps bionic implants.
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- elblanco 16y agoI'd trade the projector for a pair of glasses with a transparent display. The true power of this is really in the software. It's amazing, stunning, work.
- mambodog 16y agoIts a shame this thing didn't get more discussion the first time around (ie, here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944923 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944923) To my mind, this idea seems much more realistically applicable than the one that Underkoffler presented. Partly because Pranav Mistry just has much better ideas for applications of the tech, perhaps because his designs seem more application oriented. Maybe the submitters need work on their linkbait titles (like 'The Future of UI').
- treblig 16y agoAt 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 16y agoAll 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 16y agoYes 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.
- ams6110 16y agoSigh. In 5 year's time I'm quite certain I'll still be spending 90% of my time in Emacs or a shell, just like I was doing 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago.
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- musclman 16y agoSure, 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 :-)
- josh33 16y agoAll technology feels lousy out of its time. He's giving the hackers/entrepreneurs the tech. It's up to us to create some valuable/entertaining/necessary functions out of it.
- EAMiller 16y agoAgreed, every time I see this my arms feel tired.
- mechanical_fish 16y agoKeep in mind that, like most of the things designed at the Media Lab, this was built to look really good in demos. The movements are big and inefficient so they will show up well on stage and on camera. In the real world the movements might be much more subtle. Certainly no broader than, say, American Sign Language, which is quite analogous to what we are reinventing here.
- lkozma 16y agoSorry, I'm skeptical about that. The movements are big so that they will be captured and correctly interpreted by their pattern recognition system. I think they would not be able to detect very subtle movements like ASL. It is ingenious to claim that it was made artificially big and clumsy for the audience.
- stanleydrew 16y agoI think you mean disingenuous.
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- daralthus 16y agoThis 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 16y agoIt'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 16y agowow, 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.
- tgandrews 16y agoThe 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.
- jules 16y agoWhat would make sense I think it just using your hands on the table instead of using a mouse. Touchpads do some of this but they don't work very well and the surface is usually very small.
- Scriptor 16y agoThe 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.
- sdfx 16y agoThese 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 16y agoTheir 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.
- MikeCapone 16y ago> 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. Definitely. I've been watching the car industry for a few years now, and I'm still waiting for an "Apple" to emerge.
- riffer 16y agoI've been watching the car industry for a few years now, and I'm still waiting for an "Apple" to emerge. Give Tesla a few years
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- johnthedebs 16y ago"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.
- frou_dh 16y agoI 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!
- pedrokost 16y agoWhat 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 16y agohttp://cm.bell-labs.com/plan9/ http://cm.bell-labs.com/plan9/
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- ghempton 16y agoHe 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 16y agoA lot of this has been done with openFrameworks (http://openframeworks.cc/ 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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- fjabre 16y agoEverybody 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_interface http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain%E2%80%93computer_interfac...
- gojomo 16y agoThe way things are going, the first mass-market UI that can be "navigated just by thinking" will probably require users to think in mandarin.
- inimino 16y agoPhysical 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 16y agoI'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.
- koeselitz 16y ago"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 16y agoI presume "we" there means the general market to which the Mac was introduced. Ubiquitous Internet access was years away.
- stcredzero 16y agoI thought there were Ethernet LAN in Xerox Parc in the 70's.
- elblanco 16y agoNice 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
- donaq 16y ago5 years seems way too optimistic for this stuff to appear in consumer products. I'm betting no.
- georgieporgie 16y agoThe 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...
- ryanjmo 16y agoThis talk seems like a whole bunch of 3-D snake oil.
- Tycho 16y agoI'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.
- bruceboughton 16y agoI 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.