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A brief rant on the future of interaction design (2011)

238 points by picture 4y ago

seltzered_ 4y ago
Title edit request: from 2011 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=a+brief+rant+on+the+future+of+interaction https://hn.algolia.com/?q=a+brief+rant+on+the+future+of+inte...
- dmitriid 4y ago
  Doesn't matter if it's from 2011. It's evergreen
  - rchaud 4y ago
    Except for the Youtube embed shown right at the start of the article.
    - ghoulishly 4y ago
      Mirror of the video if you're interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KytMZOLyF4Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KytMZOLyF4Q
throwaway-jim 4y ago
404
elil17 4y ago
I'm a mechanical engineer and my favorite way to interact with my computer is with my SpaceMouse [1], a sort of joy-stick that you can pull or rotate in any direction to drag, spin, and scale 3D models. You can also use it to fly around Excel spreadsheets or scroll through web pages. One thing that I love about it is the grip I can use - it's the "precision" grip that the author discusses in the article, and it gives me a lot of fine control over what I'm doing. The other day, I saw the haptic smart knob on Hackaday [2]. It's a force feedback rotating knob with software defined detents and boundaries. If someone could combine the SpaceMouse with the smart knob, I think the resulting multiple DOF force feedback controller might just be the input device of the future. [1]: https://3dconnexion.com/uk/product/spacemouse-compact/ https://3dconnexion.com/uk/product/spacemouse-compact/ [2]: https://hackaday.com/2022/03/13/haptic-smart-knob-does-several-jobs/#more-526563 https://hackaday.com/2022/03/13/haptic-smart-knob-does-sever...
- jkestner 4y ago
  The SpaceMouse is a great piece of interaction design/mechanical engineering; makes CAD much less painful. (Never tried it on a spreadsheet!) The key is the mechanical springs in it which provide just a bit of resistance without impeding precise control. It has a bit of a learning curve, kinda like when Macs reversed the finger scroll gesture on trackpads, but then it becomes part of my left hand while my right hand mans the mouse.
  - elil17 4y ago
    Honestly I did not find the learning curve that bad. It took me about 15 minutes to get as fast with the SpaceMouse as I am with a regular mouse. However the skill ceiling is high and there's a lot of potential to get really good with it.
- iratewizard 4y ago
  I was going to write you off as one of those weird trackball people, but then I dug into the mouse. It does look like a useful tool for CAD in conjunction with a normal mouse
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    What's wrong with trackballs?
  - jeffreygoesto 4y ago
    Not only that. Nothing beats flying through Google Earth with a SpaceMouse!
    - Stratoscope 4y ago
      Definitely. In Google Earth Pro there are a few settings to tweak in the Navigation options. Turn on Enable Controller, of course, and turn OFF Reverse Controls and Enable Visualization. I also like to turn on "Do not automatically tilt while zooming". I don't recall if that affects SpaceMouse, but I don't like the default automatic tilt when using regular mouse or keyboard navigation. Also if you are using a ThinkPad, be sure to try each of the three mouse buttons (hold one down and move the TrackPoint around) when not using the SpaceMouse.
underbluewaters 4y ago
I've seen demo mobile apps that used the vibration motor to give haptic feedback, simulating the feel of buttons and such as you moved your finger across the screen. At the time I thought for sure the next iPhone would feature "Haptic Touch" apis and it would just be a given in a few years. Still waiting...
- bobbylarrybobby 4y ago
  Well there is haptic feedback on the newer phones, usually to tell you you've crossed some drag- or timer-based threshold, but yeah it's pretty limited in scope.
- PhilipTrauner 4y ago
  UIFeedbackGenerator (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uifeedbackgenerator https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uifeedbackge...) has been around for a while, but it’s not exactly capable of "positional" feedback. Still, vibrating in response to actions such as rearranging list entries or drag interactions that require a certain distance threshold to be passed can feel quite satisfying.
douglaswlance 4y ago
The future of digital interaction will be three dimensional and skeumorphic.
blenderdt 4y ago
Since this is from 2011 you should take a look at his future of interactice design: https://dynamicland.org/ https://dynamicland.org/
- Pulcinella 4y ago
  I mention it elsewhere, but unfortunately I don’t believe Dynamicland exists anymore as a physical space. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31531398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31531398
nathias 4y ago
bring back old school mechanical knobs
- a4isms 4y ago
  Says EVERYONE who drives a late-model car that sticks everything behind the sliding fingers under glass UX, from climate controls to the volume of the stereo. This is a known problem, and one that will get people killed, because it demands that drivers focus on the infotainment screen and not the road to do a mundane task that their tactile fingers could easily perform on their own with mechanical controls.
- bmitc 4y ago
  It's really unbelievable how effective knobs, switches, buttons, dials, and dedicated screens or displays are.
- nfoz 4y ago
  Using synthesizer hardware is a joy of an experience.
  - tenebrisalietum 4y ago
    It's interesting tha synthesizers went through this already. In the 70's and early 80's--analog synthesizers--everything was knobs, sliders, and real buttons. Then everything was stuffed behind a minimum of buttons and maybe 1 or 2 knobs/sliders if you wer lucky, and a plethora of options and menus buried behind often a thin 16x2 LCD display. That was the early to mid 90's--analog sounds in electronic music started making a comeback, and by the latter half of the 90's and beyond everything started to have knobs and sliders again, even if the internals were no longer analog. I do wonder if not for that trend driven by the TB-303 and what not, would that even have happened to synthesizers. Maybe the same blacklash and pendulum swing will happen with everything else, but it seems like there's more pressure than ever to make users fit the product and save costs that way, rather than make the product for users and accept the price increases.
    - 4y ago
rchaud 4y ago
> "I call this technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade." Anybody remember the 2008 Blackberry Storm, the company's iPhone competitor? It had a "clickable" glass panel, to bridge the UX gap between the tactile KB BlackBerry phones and the touchscreen-only Storm. Touching an icon required tapping the glass panel, which had some give, making it feel like a big button. It was far from a perfect experience. The touch events all worked, but I always felt that I was about the break the screen with each successive touch.
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
For perhaps the ultimate example of "pictures under glass", contrast this product: https://www.slatemt.com/ https://www.slatemt.com/ with a traditional mixing console, full of physical objects to press, grab, twirl, slide etc.
- asperous 4y ago
  It is interesting to contrast this with the ableton push or the launchpad, which basically does the opposite; gives you a physical controller tied to a digital interface.
DANK_YACHT 4y ago
Hands feel and manipulate things because they evolved in a physical world where that type of interaction was most efficient. The digital world opens up new possibilities that don't need physical manipulation to be controlled. It feels a bit luddite to restrict interaction just to physical manipulation. I agree, sometimes designers go too far, e.g. in the case of touch-screen hvac controls in cars. However, there are also examples where physical manipulation is not desired. For instance, the smartphone is so powerful because it's not tied to one physical mode of operation. It can have buttons for a calculator, or a keyboard, or serve as a book, or a video game controller, or... Given that this was written in 2011, I commend the author for having an opinion, but it has aged rather like milk to me.
- Dangeranger 4y ago
  The author, Bret Victor, put his money where is mouth was and founded a tangible computing organization named Dynamic Land[0] that is funded in part by the research organization led by Alan Kay. Dynamic Land might be the most interesting approach to collaborative computing in person that I’ve seen to date. Bret designed the system, wrote the operating system, and the libraries used to interact with the OS via physical objects. It’s awesome. [0] https://dynamicland.org/ https://dynamicland.org/
  - DANK_YACHT 4y ago
    I find Tilt Five[0] to be 100x more interesting than Dynamic Land. They don't serve entirely the same purpose, but I think it illustrates the difference between clinging to the past (Dynamic Land) and embracing a digital future (Tilt Five). Both solutions are powered by projectors and sensors, but Tilt Five pushes the envelope a lot further than Dynamic Land. [0] https://www.tiltfive.com/ https://www.tiltfive.com/
    - dahauns 4y ago
      You're creating an artificial dichotomy here with empty buzzwords. What exactly makes one the opposite of the other?
    - 4y ago
pvsnp 4y ago
I was wondering why this sounded familiar and it's from 2011. Here are various things that have been invented along the same lines as Bret mentions. * https://dynamicland.org/ https://dynamicland.org/ - Bret Victor's vision, looks really cool * Kinect was released (November 4, 2010) a little before this article and presented another vision of future, but the market didn't think so * Oculus now detects hands and I'm pretty hopeful this will add more gestures and similar gait detection will be huge for interfaces All in all, the incremental changes are starting to look more like what Bret is suggesting rather than purely "pane of glass"
- Dangeranger 4y ago
  Two things about Dynamic Land that I love. 1) Bret brought the computer into the world, instead of bringing the world into the computer, e.g. Oculus or Vive. 2) The operating system that senses the world and reads instructions from objects is influenced by Smalltalk, and from what I understand allows for Smalltalk like programs to run on it in the form of object instructions and interactions.
  - mlajtos 4y ago
    Ad 2, why do you think Realtalk has any resemblance to Smalltalk? https://colelawrence.com/posts/2018-12-06-distribution-models-for-realtalk-os/ https://colelawrence.com/posts/2018-12-06-distribution-model...
- Pulcinella 4y ago
  Unfortunately I think Dynamicland is dead. The physical space in Oakland doesn’t exist anymore. It sounds like only Bret Victor and maybe one other person are left and Victor is relocating to a university Biology lab to try to implement his ideas there. Source: Andy Matuschak mentions it in https://www.notion.so/blog/andy-matuschak https://www.notion.so/blog/andy-matuschak One thing which comes to mind is that Dynamicland is a strange laboratory. It was a space in Oakland that is no more, but it's a physical environment where the primary activity being undertaken was creating this very unusual computing system. … And in fact, that's exactly what the principal investigator is doing right now. He's picking up and relocating the work to very interesting synthetic biology lab, where maybe now that the further development of the system will happen in a way that's meant to support this professor's research.
notjustanymike 4y ago
Why is it that, without fail, design sites talking about user experience have a tiny gray font?
- picture 4y ago
  You may use reader view, or zoom in. I opine that good design isn't just about being usable to the lowest common denominator (like huge font for grannies) but rather giving the user the power to customize their own experience.
  - notjustanymike 4y ago
    This means the "good design" comes from the additional functionality provided by the browser to overcome to the poor choices of the site.
  - avgcorrection 4y ago
    Well this granny doesn’t have perfect vision so it’s nice when the default isn’t tuned for perfect human specimen, especially when the default doesn’t seem to buy us anything (what does grey text accomplish?). Not that this website is that bad... I just find this attitude to be annoying. :) Maybe I’m still in partial denial about my deficiencies. Thank goodness for my browser’s reader mode though when the website has way too long lines. No credit to the website designers, of course.
    - nicbou 4y ago
      Could you tell me what you think of guides on allaboutberlin.com? I care a great deal about readability, but I’m not sure if I’m doing it well. I made the font a big bigger on desktop this week. Now I wonder if Open Sans was a good choice.
      - avgcorrection 4y ago
        I think it looks good. Decent font and size. I’m not sure about some of the footnote (raised) style hyperlinks. They could be difficult to use on mobile.
bowsamic 4y ago
Imo, the idea that it would be great to type on a glass touch screen is Steve Jobs biggest and most long-lasting misstep. Overall I think it's interesting and bizarre that both modern technology and visions of the future have totally sacrificed tactility. It seemed to be all about removing the real world: tactile interfaces are old fashioned, in the future everything works in a way that has minimal connection to reality, e.g. a Minority Report style UI, and so obviously is ethereal and cannot be touched. It makes me wonder why we had that ideal in the first place, and whether that ideal shaped technology or vice versa. Why did we fantasise about losing tactility? Something I've also noticed is that we almost seem to be unable to imagine a programmable tactile interface, even in science fiction. I guess humans wanted "something extra/futuristic/other-worldly", and that meant having things be unlike anything else in the world, which as the author points out, means something without tactility.
- xav0989 4y ago
  IIRC, there was a US Navy ship whose stations had physical buttons, knobs, and switches that were software controlled, as in they mapped to different function depending on if the operator selected the weapons, or navigation, or radar, etc. functions. You still had the tactile interface, but you gained the flexibility of the dynamic interfaces. Not sure how well it performed though.
  - picture 4y ago
    I think that's a pretty common design pattern for industrial/reliable applications. Multi Function Displays have been common in "glass-cockpit" aircraft for a long time. The F16 notably also feature master mode switches on the group of buttons below the HUD. It allows the operator to quickly switch between air to air, air to ground, dogfight modes, etc, bringing up relevant displays and controls at a moment's notice. I've heard that pilots consider F16 one of the best designed in terms of interface. Soft buttons are also pretty common for test and measurement equipment. I own many modern digital oscilloscopes and spectrum analyzers, all of which feature physical buttons around the screen that are selected by software to do different things
  - jakzurr 4y ago
morley 4y ago
Is there any research into causing flat surfaces to simulate a bump while still remaining flat? I think I've read about interfaces that can raise or lower some parts for buttons, but it would be a lot more convenient to have a glass display where you can "feel" the outline of a button electro-chemically without it actually being there.
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  They do fingerprint reading through the screen on mobile phones by using ultrasound; I wonder if you can up the intensity to provide a haptic affordance to on-screen 'features' like buttons and such.
wly_cdgr 4y ago
Young interaction designers have been ranting about this for a while, but I for one do not want what they think I want. I like flat screens and want flat screens, even in VR
natly 4y ago
I wish more people experimented with hand input since this has essentially been solved in recent years due to advancements in computer vision: https://mediapipe.dev/ https://mediapipe.dev/. Yeah it might be awkward to ask the user to activate their camera, etc etc. But right now I'm barely seeing any experimentation in this direction which is a shame. Part of me wonders if it's just that people don't know that this is solved on the web, so make sure to go here and try it out and make something if Brets article appealed to you: https://google.github.io/mediapipe/solutions/hands#javascript-solution-api https://google.github.io/mediapipe/solutions/hands#javascrip... + https://codepen.io/mediapipe/pen/RwGWYJw https://codepen.io/mediapipe/pen/RwGWYJw
- raihansaputra 4y ago
  I think one way this can be more acceptable is to redirect the camera to view the hands above the keyboard instead of having to wave my hands in front of my face. Interesting to be able to enable gestures to swipe desktops without using the trackpad.
- woojoo666 4y ago
  The LeapMotion was basically a really accurate Kinect for your hands, and that was back in 2014. I always wondered why it never took off, and I suspect it's a market issue more than a technological one. Waving your hand in the air and doing hand gestures just didn't provide enough benefit I guess
  - RugnirViking 4y ago
    "really accurate" that wasn't my experience of the leap motion at all, we had one alongside an occulus rift dev kit in a museum I worked for and it was essentially impossible to use, even for their inbuilt demo games. We got a replacement and had the same experience so just gave up on it.
  - novirium 4y ago
    I had one of the LeapMotion input devices back around when they launched, and really did try to use it in earnest - using a whole bunch of shortcuts and AutoHotkey hacks to navigate the OS with it. There were even experimental programs people wrote to input text with it, using something similar to chorded keyboards. It didn't really work out though. Long story short: my arms got tired. Turns out that it's a kinda fundamental problem with how they had designed the interface - hovering your hands above something for extended periods of time is simply just tiring and uncomfortable.
makeitdouble 4y ago
Perhaps it’s the 2011 date that makes it odd, but I think the author is picking way too much on dumb marketing commercials, when there are countless of companies in the world shipping actual products fitting these ideas. For instance Nintendo has been exploring that space for so long, coming up at mass market level with different paradigms to interact with their devices. Microsoft has a long history of UX/UI research and actual shipped adaptive products, including for people with special needs. We’re going way past 2011 but there is also a ton of research on better haptic feedback and ways to make the “R” part of VR more real. On the other side, I’m sure I’m not alone in disabling most of the input haptics and sounds and animations when setting up a new phone or laptop. Glass is fine for visual things, and I’m also fine with only visual feedback when using hand tracking on the Quest2 for instance, and the stuff I am manipulating are menus and lists, and I’m fine with no tactile feedback for fundamentally virtual concepts.
- dahauns 4y ago
  >Glass is fine for visual things, and I’m also fine with only visual feedback when using hand tracking on the Quest2 for instance. Hard disagree here. As impressive as the hand tracking in the Quest 2 is (especially the new 2.0 iteration - just...wow.), I'll prophesize that until at least some kind of haptic feedback system is available (Powerglove 2.0! :) ) it will hit a brick wall. Hard. It's such a natural mode of interaction that the total lack of haptic feedback sticks out like a sore thumb and breaks the immersion hard - so much so that I find myself going back to the Oculus controllers after a few minutes because they feel(!) more natural. They only might be a crude first order approximation, but at least there I have a "power grip", for example.
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    I find this pretty interesting in that we still haven’t found a practical “raison d’etre” for VR, which makes the great and deal breaking parts completely different for each of us. I see the future of VR as two-fold, with the use as a specific tool on one side, and games/entertainment on the other side. On the tool side, I see hand tracking as 90% there, would use it mostly for navigation and input, and totally see myself in excel like applications with finger gestures and Minority Report like movements but actually well thought and useful. I am with you one the game/entertainment side, where more feedback and immersion would tremendously help enjoy being in the moment and feeling things that aren’t there.
twic 4y ago
I suspect this emphasis on tactility is sentimental nonsense. But we should definitely give it a serious try to find out! What i would be much more interested in is eye tracking. I have three screens covered in interactivity, but the speed at which i can interact with them - which is the speed at which i can explore and experiment - is limited by the speed with which i can grasp my mouse, then shove it around to position the cursor. I'm convinced i could do many things so much more fluidly if the machine could see where i was looking at transfer focus there in a flash.
- ajdegol 4y ago
  It’s not sentimental nonsense: it’s enactive cognition. I believe this is a hugely under appreciated capability of humans, possibly one of the keys to a type of genius.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > I suspect this emphasis on tactility is sentimental nonsense. I don't think it's sentimental to think it's undesirable to have one of your senses muted.
- a4isms 4y ago
  Drive a modern car where everything that used to be a button or switch is now hidden behind glass. Wanting the return of mechanical controls with tactile feedback is not sentimentality, it's usability.
  - euroderf 4y ago
    This glass-based crap is the most blatant evidence of pervasive user interface CHEAPNIS. Yes, bring back buttons... and big chunky toggle switches... and especially rocker switches <3 Ditch the useless glossy glass crap and the el-cheapo membrane buttons that rot out RSN.
    - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
      Rant: my car (Zafira) has an indicator stem that returns to centre when you activate it. Normally they stay offset so it's very clear the indicator is on. Pair that with a too quiet 'tick' sound and the indicator on the driver's panel being hidden behind the steering wheel ... it makes the vehicle so frustrating to drive. Argh, HCI is so important. Also, while I'm here, the steering wheel is adjustable in height as in many cars, but I've never seen a vehicle with indicator lights on the driver's panel at the top and bottom (they're all at the top) so there's always chance you can't see them when you adjust the wheel height. I've driven a lot of cars as we often hire. Seems like a fundamental flaw to me.
causality0 4y ago
The war on tactile interfaces is doing incredible amounts of harm. Personally my life got perceptible better after I 3D-printed mouse buttons and glued them on top of my laptop's clickpad.
- nfoz 4y ago
  Could you share your model for this? How well does it work? I've considered doing the same. The set of laptops I'm willing to run non-macOS on is limited by the set of laptops that have physical touchpad buttons, and that's a diminishingly small market segment :(
  - causality0 4y ago
    They work quite well. The biggest difference is that they're attached to the same plane so the sides of the gap between them don't move up and down independently of each other, which makes it slightly harder to tell which side is which by touch. The pad can still sense your finger through them so it knows where you're clicking. I can post the model after I return from vacation next week, but you'll have to shape and size it for the target touchpad anyway. It's essentially just a flat rectangle with a radiused corner that's half the length of the touchpad, with a semi-circle in the middle to index my finger on. The thickness is 0.6mm for the tallest part. This will vary depending on the geometry of the bottom edge of your pad. I used silicone glue so it's easily removable with no surface damage. https://i.imgur.com/yQj8TYJ.jpg https://i.imgur.com/yQj8TYJ.jpg
snowwrestler 4y ago
Our computer interactions could be so much richer if we allowed computers to observe and listen to us and our surroundings continuously. They would learn faster, and have the full context of everything we say or ask for or point at or do. But we don’t allow that, because we are (rightly) worried that doing so would give all our private and sensitive personal information to greedy companies and invasive governments. The future of computer interaction depends not on better hardware or algorithms, it depends on trust. And discretion. Solve those problems and you will unlock huge potential.
- stonemetal12 4y ago
  They do such a bad job with the context they currently have, that I can't see adding more context doing anything other than confusing them.
kwatsonafter 4y ago
Does anyone know if it's possible to visit DynamicLand in Oakland? Massive Bret Victor fan.
carapace 4y ago
I think kinematic UI's would at first seem new and fun, but then become tedious. Sign language has less bandwidth than speaking or typing and expends more calories.
- c22 4y ago
  > Sign language has less bandwidth than speaking... Do you have a citation for this claim? The research I can find seems to show that signers and oral speakers convey concepts at roughly the same rate with ASL perhaps slightly more efficient than orally spoken english. (Signers use fewer signs per second than oral speakers do words but compress more information into each sign, or perhaps simply omit extraneous information that has no effect on the meaning.)
  - carapace 4y ago
    Thank you for the correction. In hindsight I sound foolish: e.g. sign-language interpreters keep up with the speech they are translating, eh?
egypturnash 4y ago
“So here’s a vision of the future that’s popular right now. [video embed, black with the text THIS VIDEO IS PRIVATE]” I like this vision a whole lot.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jakzurr 4y ago
  I don't think the author has updated the site since 2011. Here's a link someone posted above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KytMZOLyF4Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KytMZOLyF4Q I don't think it's his vision; more like "anti-vision". ;)
deleted 4y ago
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mbesto 4y ago
Surprise there is no mention of the terms: Gorilla Arm and Tactile Feedback (haptics). These are the two reasons the "minority report" style of interactive design will never catch on for humans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haptic_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haptic_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#%22Gorilla_arm%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#%22Gorilla_arm%22
deleted 4y ago
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March_f6 4y ago
Did I read this article wrong? Are hands a metaphor for something? A lot of people can't and/or eventually won't be able to use their hands. This was as true in 2011 as it is now.
- sleepydog 4y ago
  Are the "pictures under glass" interfaces critiqued in the article really any better for those who cannot use their hands? I have full use of my hands, so I am not sure, but the few people I know with limited hand control use some specialized input device that they can operate with their mouth, eyes, or head.
city17 4y ago
I also have a preference for more tactile inputs and was looking around earlier at some different controllers, e.g. MIDI sliders, knobs, buttons that you can connect to pretty much any application. Or alternatives like the Surface dial or Streamdeck. Interested to hear if anyone has a setup like that that feels nice and is actually useful?
pruett 4y ago
Legend
smm11 4y ago
Not totally on topic, but I just bought a new Mac running Monterey. I've been running Win 10 and 11, and Ubuntu since 2014 or so, otherwise. And the current OS X interface is nauseating. How we had decent GUIs when computers were 1/1000th what today's are, and this flat, ugly, undefined, pasty BS is acceptable is beyond me. No joke, I'm returning the M1 machine and will go back to dual-boot Win11 and Ubuntu. Sorry, Apple, but you've lost your way.
munro 4y ago
Great stuff, especially posted to a programming community. I wonder if coding a system was more spatial & tactile. I think may just make it easier to get back into a project after setting it down for a month or more, who knows.
dang 4y ago
Related: A brief rant on the future of interaction design (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21116948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21116948 - Sept 2019 (153 comments) A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6325996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6325996 - Sept 2013 (35 comments) A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3212949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3212949 - Nov 2011 (150 comments)
DonHopkins 4y ago
Speaking of interaction design, nice mechanical switches, how fantastic hands are at manipulating things, and The Adams Family Thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tQq7OTygyg&t=59m35s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tQq7OTygyg&t=59m35s >Constructionism2016 Session 16: Plenary 4, Cynthia Solomon >One of the funny things Marvin Minsky did in his younger days is that he spend time with another very famous computerist, Claude Shannon. >And Claude Shannon and Marvin came up with The Most Useless Box In The World. >It, uh, I have a video of somebody... What it is, is um, actually, Claude -- Marvin designed it, and Claud built it. >And it's a box. You turn it on, and a hand comes out and shuts it off. It goes back in. >People don't know, but that's Marvin and Claude Shannon. Claude Shannon was the father on information theory. That's what he did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_machine >The best-known "useless machines" are those inspired by Marvin Minsky's design, in which the device's sole function is to switch itself off by operating its own "off" switch. Their popularity has recently been raised by commercial success. More elaborate devices and some novelty toys, which have a more obvious function or entertainment value, have been based on these simple "useless machines". [...] >The version of the useless machine that became famous in information theory (basically a box with a simple switch which, when turned "on", causes a hand or lever to appear from inside the box that switches the machine "off" before disappearing inside the box again) appears to have been invented by MIT professor and artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, while he was a graduate student at Bell Labs in 1952. Minsky dubbed his invention the "ultimate machine", but that sense of the term did not catch on. The device has also been called the "Leave Me Alone Box". >Minsky's mentor at Bell Labs, information theory pioneer Claude Shannon (who later also became an MIT professor), made his own versions of the machine. He kept one on his desk, where science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke saw it. Clarke later wrote, "There is something unspeakably sinister about a machine that does nothing—absolutely nothing—except switch itself off", and he was fascinated by the concept. >Minsky also invented a "gravity machine" that would ring a bell if the gravitational constant were to change, a theoretical possibility that is not expected to occur in the foreseeable future. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw2Bq0HYu1M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw2Bq0HYu1M >The Ultimate Machine >Davide Moises (1973-), The Ultimate Machine nach Claude E. Shannon, Die Sammlung David Moises, Multimediale Installation, 2009 Technisches Museum Wien https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iattYDKp3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iattYDKp3A >SMALL moody useless box " leave me alone " box. This useless box has an attitude. It has a variety of movements and behaves very cute when you shut it off. [...]

238 points by picture 4y ago

Title edit request: from 2011 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=a+brief+rant+on+the+future+of+interaction https://hn.algolia.com/?q=a+brief+rant+on+the+future+of+inte...

dmitriid 4y ago
Doesn't matter if it's from 2011. It's evergreen
- rchaud 4y ago
  Except for the Youtube embed shown right at the start of the article.
  - ghoulishly 4y ago
    Mirror of the video if you're interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KytMZOLyF4Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KytMZOLyF4Q

throwaway-jim 4y ago

404

elil17 4y ago

I'm a mechanical engineer and my favorite way to interact with my computer is with my SpaceMouse [1], a sort of joy-stick that you can pull or rotate in any direction to drag, spin, and scale 3D models. You can also use it to fly around Excel spreadsheets or scroll through web pages. One thing that I love about it is the grip I can use - it's the "precision" grip that the author discusses in the article, and it gives me a lot of fine control over what I'm doing. The other day, I saw the haptic smart knob on Hackaday [2]. It's a force feedback rotating knob with software defined detents and boundaries. If someone could combine the SpaceMouse with the smart knob, I think the resulting multiple DOF force feedback controller might just be the input device of the future. [1]: https://3dconnexion.com/uk/product/spacemouse-compact/ https://3dconnexion.com/uk/product/spacemouse-compact/ [2]: https://hackaday.com/2022/03/13/haptic-smart-knob-does-several-jobs/#more-526563 https://hackaday.com/2022/03/13/haptic-smart-knob-does-sever...

jkestner 4y ago
The SpaceMouse is a great piece of interaction design/mechanical engineering; makes CAD much less painful. (Never tried it on a spreadsheet!) The key is the mechanical springs in it which provide just a bit of resistance without impeding precise control. It has a bit of a learning curve, kinda like when Macs reversed the finger scroll gesture on trackpads, but then it becomes part of my left hand while my right hand mans the mouse.
- elil17 4y ago
  Honestly I did not find the learning curve that bad. It took me about 15 minutes to get as fast with the SpaceMouse as I am with a regular mouse. However the skill ceiling is high and there's a lot of potential to get really good with it.
iratewizard 4y ago
I was going to write you off as one of those weird trackball people, but then I dug into the mouse. It does look like a useful tool for CAD in conjunction with a normal mouse
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  What's wrong with trackballs?
- jeffreygoesto 4y ago
  Not only that. Nothing beats flying through Google Earth with a SpaceMouse!
  - Stratoscope 4y ago
    Definitely. In Google Earth Pro there are a few settings to tweak in the Navigation options. Turn on Enable Controller, of course, and turn OFF Reverse Controls and Enable Visualization. I also like to turn on "Do not automatically tilt while zooming". I don't recall if that affects SpaceMouse, but I don't like the default automatic tilt when using regular mouse or keyboard navigation. Also if you are using a ThinkPad, be sure to try each of the three mouse buttons (hold one down and move the TrackPoint around) when not using the SpaceMouse.

underbluewaters 4y ago

I've seen demo mobile apps that used the vibration motor to give haptic feedback, simulating the feel of buttons and such as you moved your finger across the screen. At the time I thought for sure the next iPhone would feature "Haptic Touch" apis and it would just be a given in a few years. Still waiting...

bobbylarrybobby 4y ago
Well there is haptic feedback on the newer phones, usually to tell you you've crossed some drag- or timer-based threshold, but yeah it's pretty limited in scope.
PhilipTrauner 4y ago
UIFeedbackGenerator (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uifeedbackgenerator https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uifeedbackge...) has been around for a while, but it’s not exactly capable of "positional" feedback. Still, vibrating in response to actions such as rearranging list entries or drag interactions that require a certain distance threshold to be passed can feel quite satisfying.

douglaswlance 4y ago

The future of digital interaction will be three dimensional and skeumorphic.

blenderdt 4y ago

Since this is from 2011 you should take a look at his future of interactice design: https://dynamicland.org/ https://dynamicland.org/

Pulcinella 4y ago
I mention it elsewhere, but unfortunately I don’t believe Dynamicland exists anymore as a physical space. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31531398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31531398

nathias 4y ago

bring back old school mechanical knobs

a4isms 4y ago
Says EVERYONE who drives a late-model car that sticks everything behind the sliding fingers under glass UX, from climate controls to the volume of the stereo. This is a known problem, and one that will get people killed, because it demands that drivers focus on the infotainment screen and not the road to do a mundane task that their tactile fingers could easily perform on their own with mechanical controls.
bmitc 4y ago
It's really unbelievable how effective knobs, switches, buttons, dials, and dedicated screens or displays are.
nfoz 4y ago
Using synthesizer hardware is a joy of an experience.
- tenebrisalietum 4y ago
  It's interesting tha synthesizers went through this already. In the 70's and early 80's--analog synthesizers--everything was knobs, sliders, and real buttons. Then everything was stuffed behind a minimum of buttons and maybe 1 or 2 knobs/sliders if you wer lucky, and a plethora of options and menus buried behind often a thin 16x2 LCD display. That was the early to mid 90's--analog sounds in electronic music started making a comeback, and by the latter half of the 90's and beyond everything started to have knobs and sliders again, even if the internals were no longer analog. I do wonder if not for that trend driven by the TB-303 and what not, would that even have happened to synthesizers. Maybe the same blacklash and pendulum swing will happen with everything else, but it seems like there's more pressure than ever to make users fit the product and save costs that way, rather than make the product for users and accept the price increases.
  - 4y ago

rchaud 4y ago

> "I call this technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade." Anybody remember the 2008 Blackberry Storm, the company's iPhone competitor? It had a "clickable" glass panel, to bridge the UX gap between the tactile KB BlackBerry phones and the touchscreen-only Storm. Touching an icon required tapping the glass panel, which had some give, making it feel like a big button. It was far from a perfect experience. The touch events all worked, but I always felt that I was about the break the screen with each successive touch.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago

For perhaps the ultimate example of "pictures under glass", contrast this product: https://www.slatemt.com/ https://www.slatemt.com/ with a traditional mixing console, full of physical objects to press, grab, twirl, slide etc.

asperous 4y ago
It is interesting to contrast this with the ableton push or the launchpad, which basically does the opposite; gives you a physical controller tied to a digital interface.

DANK_YACHT 4y ago

Hands feel and manipulate things because they evolved in a physical world where that type of interaction was most efficient. The digital world opens up new possibilities that don't need physical manipulation to be controlled. It feels a bit luddite to restrict interaction just to physical manipulation. I agree, sometimes designers go too far, e.g. in the case of touch-screen hvac controls in cars. However, there are also examples where physical manipulation is not desired. For instance, the smartphone is so powerful because it's not tied to one physical mode of operation. It can have buttons for a calculator, or a keyboard, or serve as a book, or a video game controller, or... Given that this was written in 2011, I commend the author for having an opinion, but it has aged rather like milk to me.

Dangeranger 4y ago
The author, Bret Victor, put his money where is mouth was and founded a tangible computing organization named Dynamic Land[0] that is funded in part by the research organization led by Alan Kay. Dynamic Land might be the most interesting approach to collaborative computing in person that I’ve seen to date. Bret designed the system, wrote the operating system, and the libraries used to interact with the OS via physical objects. It’s awesome. [0] https://dynamicland.org/ https://dynamicland.org/
- DANK_YACHT 4y ago
  I find Tilt Five[0] to be 100x more interesting than Dynamic Land. They don't serve entirely the same purpose, but I think it illustrates the difference between clinging to the past (Dynamic Land) and embracing a digital future (Tilt Five). Both solutions are powered by projectors and sensors, but Tilt Five pushes the envelope a lot further than Dynamic Land. [0] https://www.tiltfive.com/ https://www.tiltfive.com/
  - dahauns 4y ago
    You're creating an artificial dichotomy here with empty buzzwords. What exactly makes one the opposite of the other?
  - 4y ago

pvsnp 4y ago

I was wondering why this sounded familiar and it's from 2011. Here are various things that have been invented along the same lines as Bret mentions. * https://dynamicland.org/ https://dynamicland.org/ - Bret Victor's vision, looks really cool * Kinect was released (November 4, 2010) a little before this article and presented another vision of future, but the market didn't think so * Oculus now detects hands and I'm pretty hopeful this will add more gestures and similar gait detection will be huge for interfaces All in all, the incremental changes are starting to look more like what Bret is suggesting rather than purely "pane of glass"

Dangeranger 4y ago
Two things about Dynamic Land that I love. 1) Bret brought the computer into the world, instead of bringing the world into the computer, e.g. Oculus or Vive. 2) The operating system that senses the world and reads instructions from objects is influenced by Smalltalk, and from what I understand allows for Smalltalk like programs to run on it in the form of object instructions and interactions.
- mlajtos 4y ago
  Ad 2, why do you think Realtalk has any resemblance to Smalltalk? https://colelawrence.com/posts/2018-12-06-distribution-models-for-realtalk-os/ https://colelawrence.com/posts/2018-12-06-distribution-model...
Pulcinella 4y ago
Unfortunately I think Dynamicland is dead. The physical space in Oakland doesn’t exist anymore. It sounds like only Bret Victor and maybe one other person are left and Victor is relocating to a university Biology lab to try to implement his ideas there. Source: Andy Matuschak mentions it in https://www.notion.so/blog/andy-matuschak https://www.notion.so/blog/andy-matuschak One thing which comes to mind is that Dynamicland is a strange laboratory. It was a space in Oakland that is no more, but it's a physical environment where the primary activity being undertaken was creating this very unusual computing system. … And in fact, that's exactly what the principal investigator is doing right now. He's picking up and relocating the work to very interesting synthetic biology lab, where maybe now that the further development of the system will happen in a way that's meant to support this professor's research.

notjustanymike 4y ago

Why is it that, without fail, design sites talking about user experience have a tiny gray font?

picture 4y ago
You may use reader view, or zoom in. I opine that good design isn't just about being usable to the lowest common denominator (like huge font for grannies) but rather giving the user the power to customize their own experience.
- notjustanymike 4y ago
  This means the "good design" comes from the additional functionality provided by the browser to overcome to the poor choices of the site.
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  Well this granny doesn’t have perfect vision so it’s nice when the default isn’t tuned for perfect human specimen, especially when the default doesn’t seem to buy us anything (what does grey text accomplish?). Not that this website is that bad... I just find this attitude to be annoying. :) Maybe I’m still in partial denial about my deficiencies. Thank goodness for my browser’s reader mode though when the website has way too long lines. No credit to the website designers, of course.
  - nicbou 4y ago
    Could you tell me what you think of guides on allaboutberlin.com? I care a great deal about readability, but I’m not sure if I’m doing it well. I made the font a big bigger on desktop this week. Now I wonder if Open Sans was a good choice.
    - avgcorrection 4y ago
      I think it looks good. Decent font and size. I’m not sure about some of the footnote (raised) style hyperlinks. They could be difficult to use on mobile.

bowsamic 4y ago

Imo, the idea that it would be great to type on a glass touch screen is Steve Jobs biggest and most long-lasting misstep. Overall I think it's interesting and bizarre that both modern technology and visions of the future have totally sacrificed tactility. It seemed to be all about removing the real world: tactile interfaces are old fashioned, in the future everything works in a way that has minimal connection to reality, e.g. a Minority Report style UI, and so obviously is ethereal and cannot be touched. It makes me wonder why we had that ideal in the first place, and whether that ideal shaped technology or vice versa. Why did we fantasise about losing tactility? Something I've also noticed is that we almost seem to be unable to imagine a programmable tactile interface, even in science fiction. I guess humans wanted "something extra/futuristic/other-worldly", and that meant having things be unlike anything else in the world, which as the author points out, means something without tactility.

xav0989 4y ago
IIRC, there was a US Navy ship whose stations had physical buttons, knobs, and switches that were software controlled, as in they mapped to different function depending on if the operator selected the weapons, or navigation, or radar, etc. functions. You still had the tactile interface, but you gained the flexibility of the dynamic interfaces. Not sure how well it performed though.
- picture 4y ago
  I think that's a pretty common design pattern for industrial/reliable applications. Multi Function Displays have been common in "glass-cockpit" aircraft for a long time. The F16 notably also feature master mode switches on the group of buttons below the HUD. It allows the operator to quickly switch between air to air, air to ground, dogfight modes, etc, bringing up relevant displays and controls at a moment's notice. I've heard that pilots consider F16 one of the best designed in terms of interface. Soft buttons are also pretty common for test and measurement equipment. I own many modern digital oscilloscopes and spectrum analyzers, all of which feature physical buttons around the screen that are selected by software to do different things
- jakzurr 4y ago

morley 4y ago

Is there any research into causing flat surfaces to simulate a bump while still remaining flat? I think I've read about interfaces that can raise or lower some parts for buttons, but it would be a lot more convenient to have a glass display where you can "feel" the outline of a button electro-chemically without it actually being there.

pbhjpbhj 4y ago
They do fingerprint reading through the screen on mobile phones by using ultrasound; I wonder if you can up the intensity to provide a haptic affordance to on-screen 'features' like buttons and such.

wly_cdgr 4y ago

Young interaction designers have been ranting about this for a while, but I for one do not want what they think I want. I like flat screens and want flat screens, even in VR

natly 4y ago

I wish more people experimented with hand input since this has essentially been solved in recent years due to advancements in computer vision: https://mediapipe.dev/ https://mediapipe.dev/. Yeah it might be awkward to ask the user to activate their camera, etc etc. But right now I'm barely seeing any experimentation in this direction which is a shame. Part of me wonders if it's just that people don't know that this is solved on the web, so make sure to go here and try it out and make something if Brets article appealed to you: https://google.github.io/mediapipe/solutions/hands#javascript-solution-api https://google.github.io/mediapipe/solutions/hands#javascrip... + https://codepen.io/mediapipe/pen/RwGWYJw https://codepen.io/mediapipe/pen/RwGWYJw

raihansaputra 4y ago
I think one way this can be more acceptable is to redirect the camera to view the hands above the keyboard instead of having to wave my hands in front of my face. Interesting to be able to enable gestures to swipe desktops without using the trackpad.
woojoo666 4y ago
The LeapMotion was basically a really accurate Kinect for your hands, and that was back in 2014. I always wondered why it never took off, and I suspect it's a market issue more than a technological one. Waving your hand in the air and doing hand gestures just didn't provide enough benefit I guess
- RugnirViking 4y ago
  "really accurate" that wasn't my experience of the leap motion at all, we had one alongside an occulus rift dev kit in a museum I worked for and it was essentially impossible to use, even for their inbuilt demo games. We got a replacement and had the same experience so just gave up on it.
- novirium 4y ago
  I had one of the LeapMotion input devices back around when they launched, and really did try to use it in earnest - using a whole bunch of shortcuts and AutoHotkey hacks to navigate the OS with it. There were even experimental programs people wrote to input text with it, using something similar to chorded keyboards. It didn't really work out though. Long story short: my arms got tired. Turns out that it's a kinda fundamental problem with how they had designed the interface - hovering your hands above something for extended periods of time is simply just tiring and uncomfortable.

makeitdouble 4y ago

Perhaps it’s the 2011 date that makes it odd, but I think the author is picking way too much on dumb marketing commercials, when there are countless of companies in the world shipping actual products fitting these ideas. For instance Nintendo has been exploring that space for so long, coming up at mass market level with different paradigms to interact with their devices. Microsoft has a long history of UX/UI research and actual shipped adaptive products, including for people with special needs. We’re going way past 2011 but there is also a ton of research on better haptic feedback and ways to make the “R” part of VR more real. On the other side, I’m sure I’m not alone in disabling most of the input haptics and sounds and animations when setting up a new phone or laptop. Glass is fine for visual things, and I’m also fine with only visual feedback when using hand tracking on the Quest2 for instance, and the stuff I am manipulating are menus and lists, and I’m fine with no tactile feedback for fundamentally virtual concepts.

dahauns 4y ago
>Glass is fine for visual things, and I’m also fine with only visual feedback when using hand tracking on the Quest2 for instance. Hard disagree here. As impressive as the hand tracking in the Quest 2 is (especially the new 2.0 iteration - just...wow.), I'll prophesize that until at least some kind of haptic feedback system is available (Powerglove 2.0! :) ) it will hit a brick wall. Hard. It's such a natural mode of interaction that the total lack of haptic feedback sticks out like a sore thumb and breaks the immersion hard - so much so that I find myself going back to the Oculus controllers after a few minutes because they feel(!) more natural. They only might be a crude first order approximation, but at least there I have a "power grip", for example.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  I find this pretty interesting in that we still haven’t found a practical “raison d’etre” for VR, which makes the great and deal breaking parts completely different for each of us. I see the future of VR as two-fold, with the use as a specific tool on one side, and games/entertainment on the other side. On the tool side, I see hand tracking as 90% there, would use it mostly for navigation and input, and totally see myself in excel like applications with finger gestures and Minority Report like movements but actually well thought and useful. I am with you one the game/entertainment side, where more feedback and immersion would tremendously help enjoy being in the moment and feeling things that aren’t there.

twic 4y ago

I suspect this emphasis on tactility is sentimental nonsense. But we should definitely give it a serious try to find out! What i would be much more interested in is eye tracking. I have three screens covered in interactivity, but the speed at which i can interact with them - which is the speed at which i can explore and experiment - is limited by the speed with which i can grasp my mouse, then shove it around to position the cursor. I'm convinced i could do many things so much more fluidly if the machine could see where i was looking at transfer focus there in a flash.

ajdegol 4y ago
It’s not sentimental nonsense: it’s enactive cognition. I believe this is a hugely under appreciated capability of humans, possibly one of the keys to a type of genius.
tablespoon 4y ago
> I suspect this emphasis on tactility is sentimental nonsense. I don't think it's sentimental to think it's undesirable to have one of your senses muted.
a4isms 4y ago
Drive a modern car where everything that used to be a button or switch is now hidden behind glass. Wanting the return of mechanical controls with tactile feedback is not sentimentality, it's usability.
- euroderf 4y ago
  This glass-based crap is the most blatant evidence of pervasive user interface CHEAPNIS. Yes, bring back buttons... and big chunky toggle switches... and especially rocker switches <3 Ditch the useless glossy glass crap and the el-cheapo membrane buttons that rot out RSN.
  - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
    Rant: my car (Zafira) has an indicator stem that returns to centre when you activate it. Normally they stay offset so it's very clear the indicator is on. Pair that with a too quiet 'tick' sound and the indicator on the driver's panel being hidden behind the steering wheel ... it makes the vehicle so frustrating to drive. Argh, HCI is so important. Also, while I'm here, the steering wheel is adjustable in height as in many cars, but I've never seen a vehicle with indicator lights on the driver's panel at the top and bottom (they're all at the top) so there's always chance you can't see them when you adjust the wheel height. I've driven a lot of cars as we often hire. Seems like a fundamental flaw to me.

causality0 4y ago

The war on tactile interfaces is doing incredible amounts of harm. Personally my life got perceptible better after I 3D-printed mouse buttons and glued them on top of my laptop's clickpad.

nfoz 4y ago
Could you share your model for this? How well does it work? I've considered doing the same. The set of laptops I'm willing to run non-macOS on is limited by the set of laptops that have physical touchpad buttons, and that's a diminishingly small market segment :(
- causality0 4y ago
  They work quite well. The biggest difference is that they're attached to the same plane so the sides of the gap between them don't move up and down independently of each other, which makes it slightly harder to tell which side is which by touch. The pad can still sense your finger through them so it knows where you're clicking. I can post the model after I return from vacation next week, but you'll have to shape and size it for the target touchpad anyway. It's essentially just a flat rectangle with a radiused corner that's half the length of the touchpad, with a semi-circle in the middle to index my finger on. The thickness is 0.6mm for the tallest part. This will vary depending on the geometry of the bottom edge of your pad. I used silicone glue so it's easily removable with no surface damage. https://i.imgur.com/yQj8TYJ.jpg https://i.imgur.com/yQj8TYJ.jpg

snowwrestler 4y ago

Our computer interactions could be so much richer if we allowed computers to observe and listen to us and our surroundings continuously. They would learn faster, and have the full context of everything we say or ask for or point at or do. But we don’t allow that, because we are (rightly) worried that doing so would give all our private and sensitive personal information to greedy companies and invasive governments. The future of computer interaction depends not on better hardware or algorithms, it depends on trust. And discretion. Solve those problems and you will unlock huge potential.

stonemetal12 4y ago
They do such a bad job with the context they currently have, that I can't see adding more context doing anything other than confusing them.

kwatsonafter 4y ago

Does anyone know if it's possible to visit DynamicLand in Oakland? Massive Bret Victor fan.

carapace 4y ago

I think kinematic UI's would at first seem new and fun, but then become tedious. Sign language has less bandwidth than speaking or typing and expends more calories.

c22 4y ago
> Sign language has less bandwidth than speaking... Do you have a citation for this claim? The research I can find seems to show that signers and oral speakers convey concepts at roughly the same rate with ASL perhaps slightly more efficient than orally spoken english. (Signers use fewer signs per second than oral speakers do words but compress more information into each sign, or perhaps simply omit extraneous information that has no effect on the meaning.)
- carapace 4y ago
  Thank you for the correction. In hindsight I sound foolish: e.g. sign-language interpreters keep up with the speech they are translating, eh?

egypturnash 4y ago

“So here’s a vision of the future that’s popular right now. [video embed, black with the text THIS VIDEO IS PRIVATE]” I like this vision a whole lot.

deleted 4y ago
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jakzurr 4y ago
I don't think the author has updated the site since 2011. Here's a link someone posted above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KytMZOLyF4Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KytMZOLyF4Q I don't think it's his vision; more like "anti-vision". ;)

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mbesto 4y ago

Surprise there is no mention of the terms: Gorilla Arm and Tactile Feedback (haptics). These are the two reasons the "minority report" style of interactive design will never catch on for humans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haptic_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haptic_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#%22Gorilla_arm%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#%22Gorilla_arm%22

deleted 4y ago

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March_f6 4y ago

Did I read this article wrong? Are hands a metaphor for something? A lot of people can't and/or eventually won't be able to use their hands. This was as true in 2011 as it is now.

sleepydog 4y ago
Are the "pictures under glass" interfaces critiqued in the article really any better for those who cannot use their hands? I have full use of my hands, so I am not sure, but the few people I know with limited hand control use some specialized input device that they can operate with their mouth, eyes, or head.

city17 4y ago

I also have a preference for more tactile inputs and was looking around earlier at some different controllers, e.g. MIDI sliders, knobs, buttons that you can connect to pretty much any application. Or alternatives like the Surface dial or Streamdeck. Interested to hear if anyone has a setup like that that feels nice and is actually useful?

pruett 4y ago

Legend

smm11 4y ago

Not totally on topic, but I just bought a new Mac running Monterey. I've been running Win 10 and 11, and Ubuntu since 2014 or so, otherwise. And the current OS X interface is nauseating. How we had decent GUIs when computers were 1/1000th what today's are, and this flat, ugly, undefined, pasty BS is acceptable is beyond me. No joke, I'm returning the M1 machine and will go back to dual-boot Win11 and Ubuntu. Sorry, Apple, but you've lost your way.

munro 4y ago

Great stuff, especially posted to a programming community. I wonder if coding a system was more spatial & tactile. I think may just make it easier to get back into a project after setting it down for a month or more, who knows.

dang 4y ago

Related: A brief rant on the future of interaction design (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21116948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21116948 - Sept 2019 (153 comments) A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6325996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6325996 - Sept 2013 (35 comments) A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3212949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3212949 - Nov 2011 (150 comments)

DonHopkins 4y ago

Speaking of interaction design, nice mechanical switches, how fantastic hands are at manipulating things, and The Adams Family Thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tQq7OTygyg&t=59m35s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tQq7OTygyg&t=59m35s >Constructionism2016 Session 16: Plenary 4, Cynthia Solomon >One of the funny things Marvin Minsky did in his younger days is that he spend time with another very famous computerist, Claude Shannon. >And Claude Shannon and Marvin came up with The Most Useless Box In The World. >It, uh, I have a video of somebody... What it is, is um, actually, Claude -- Marvin designed it, and Claud built it. >And it's a box. You turn it on, and a hand comes out and shuts it off. It goes back in. >People don't know, but that's Marvin and Claude Shannon. Claude Shannon was the father on information theory. That's what he did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_machine >The best-known "useless machines" are those inspired by Marvin Minsky's design, in which the device's sole function is to switch itself off by operating its own "off" switch. Their popularity has recently been raised by commercial success. More elaborate devices and some novelty toys, which have a more obvious function or entertainment value, have been based on these simple "useless machines". [...] >The version of the useless machine that became famous in information theory (basically a box with a simple switch which, when turned "on", causes a hand or lever to appear from inside the box that switches the machine "off" before disappearing inside the box again) appears to have been invented by MIT professor and artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, while he was a graduate student at Bell Labs in 1952. Minsky dubbed his invention the "ultimate machine", but that sense of the term did not catch on. The device has also been called the "Leave Me Alone Box". >Minsky's mentor at Bell Labs, information theory pioneer Claude Shannon (who later also became an MIT professor), made his own versions of the machine. He kept one on his desk, where science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke saw it. Clarke later wrote, "There is something unspeakably sinister about a machine that does nothing—absolutely nothing—except switch itself off", and he was fascinated by the concept. >Minsky also invented a "gravity machine" that would ring a bell if the gravitational constant were to change, a theoretical possibility that is not expected to occur in the foreseeable future. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw2Bq0HYu1M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw2Bq0HYu1M >The Ultimate Machine >Davide Moises (1973-), The Ultimate Machine nach Claude E. Shannon, Die Sammlung David Moises, Multimediale Installation, 2009 Technisches Museum Wien https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iattYDKp3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iattYDKp3A >SMALL moody useless box " leave me alone " box. This useless box has an attitude. It has a variety of movements and behaves very cute when you shut it off. [...]