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The designer gave a lot of thought to the problems with current touchscreen UI in cars, and kudos to him for doing so. However, it's not the solution yet, in m

The designer gave a lot of thought to the problems with current touchscreen UI in cars, and kudos to him for doing so. However, it's not the solution yet, in my opinion. First, all the methods of interaction are invisible. There are no cues to tell the user what two fingers vs. four fingers will do, or what the difference is between a close-fingered gesture and a wide gesture. At best, you'd have to standardize the meanings across all cars (something that rarely happens in autos, even today there's no standard for where the wiper controls go, for instance), and even then, people would have to memorize those invisible gestures before they could use their car. Secondly, accidental inputs would happen with some frequency. People have a wide range of hand sizes, motor control skills, even number of fingers. Suppose I've got two of my fingers in a cast? I can use an existing car's dashboard just fine with that temporary impairment, but not this. Finally, it's addressing a problem that already has a solution—physical, dedicated input devices. Humans have spatial memory, we learn where things are, and learn to reach for them without looking or even thinking. Your muscle memory tells you how to reach the wiper stalk or the gear shift, which is why it's sometimes disconcerting to get into a car with the gears on the steering column if you normally shift in the center console. We need in-car systems that let the physical feedback, affordances, and reliable location of buttons, knobs, and switches interact with display systems that are designed for the attention a driver requires. You should be able to keep your eyes on the road and still adjust the air conditioning—something the designer in this video recognizes—but that shouldn't require learning invisible gestures that are prone to user error.

azinman2 13y ago
You had the same gut reaction as me but if you look at the beginning before he started using it there was a legend of how many fingers map to each icon (no room for text as well?). Beyond spatial memory what's good about this is that you don't have to look anywhere while still adjusting (some speech feedback about what mode you've selected would be good). The lack of sight is the most compelling aspect -- but I can guarantee you my parents would likely never remember the mappings and always have to look at the legend. Even then they'll probably be confused.
- jaysonelliot 13y ago
  By "cues," I mean visual affordances that persist, not instructions that are shown before using it. It's a violation of one of the fundamental rules of usability, "Recognition Rather than Recall." Look at a traditional dashboard. The air conditioning knob is a different shape and size from the stereo's volume knob, and located in a different place (ideally). Those things make it easy for the the driver to distinguish one from the other, and find them while keeping their eyes on the road. There are other cues that usually exist to help as well, such as a blue-to-red graphic around the temperature control, the volume control being next to other audio features like the radio display, etc. In an environment where the user has to keep a 3,500 lb steel machine safely controlled while traveling 100 feet per second, the rules of usability become incredibly important.
  - hootener 13y ago
    "The air conditioning knob is a different shape and size from the stereo's volume knob, and located in a different place (ideally)." You've nailed it sir. Shape coding[1]. If it's good enough for F-14 fighter pilots, it's good enough for my Toyota Camry. I echo the sentiment of others. The OPs heart is in the right place here. Mimicking sight free displays on a touch screen is laughably terrible. Take this picture [2] from OPs post. Why are the media buttons ellipsoids? They're just smaller targets to hit compared to squares! In academia, we've been researching this problem, eyes-free mobile interaction, for a very long time. Particularly in the context of interaction while walking. There are numerous approaches (e.g., Flower menus [3], utilizing pressure [4], utilizing motion [5], the list goes on). The big takeaway is that it seems like more successful systems result from the multimodal approach. OP, you've done some good work here, but consider incorporating other sensors. Voice? A camera for in-air gesture recognition? A biometric sensor that gives reasonable defaults automatically based on learned use of the driver? Touch is only one part of the problem if we move away from shape coding, and we will very likely need to utilize multimodal input if we hope for success... ...or, you know, we could just stick to that whole buttons and knobs thing. ----- [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonse_Chapanis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonse_Chapanis [2] http://matthaeuskrenn.com/new-car-ui/images/statusquo.jpg http://matthaeuskrenn.com/new-car-ui/images/statusquo.jpg [3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRSASiEBw5k http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRSASiEBw5k [4] http://www.mobilevce.com/newsite/sites/default/files/infostore/ibrief_PRESSURE(3).pdf http://www.mobilevce.com/newsite/sites/default/files/infosto... [5] http://katrinwolf.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/MobileHCI2010_foogue_final1.pdf http://katrinwolf.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/MobileHCI2...
cliveowen 13y ago
I'll also add that there are way too many ways of interactions that must necessarily be learned with a substantial time investment. Time might not seem a big deal when dealing with cars since you keep one at least for a couple years, but the mental effort required to learn all those gestures from scratch is so high that it'd definitely put off most users and result in a frustrating experience for a long stretch of time.
0xdeadbeefbabe 13y ago
Maybe the designer could attack the standards problem by writing this for embedded android with the idea that android will fill the car ui space soon (assuming the _embedded_ android docs improve). The UI can provide user feedback with static electricity, and the current could increase with the speed of the car. As for the final point, a ten key resting within hands reach would work fine. You could memorize the number sequence for different commands, and get audio feedback. Talk about a proven UI, basically the telephone. Baby boomers ought to be comfortable with it.
- SimHacker 13y ago
  From my experience working at TomTom, which uses touch screen as well as voice commands and feedback, and has purchased automotive oriented companies and integrated their products and employees into their own, I've learned that the automotive industry moves at a glacial pace compared to the computer industry. There are both good and bad reasons for this. But the important point is that automotive interfaces are designed to be built into cars at the factory, and used for many years without requiring any updates. Even if updates are possible, most people don't get them. So it's a completely different mindset and approach and time scale than people from the Silicon Valley dot-com startup industry have. Another factor is that the devices built into cars have a very long design and production lead time, and by the time the car comes out, the built in hardware and software is already quite obsolete compared to the smartphone the driver probably owns. Factoring the problem out of the car to run in a smartphone or tablet itself also has its own frustrating problems, because when you're designing an automotive computer system, you can't predict what kind of technology and standards will be available or popular by the time it ships. It's a very difficult problem space, and the stakes are extremely high, not just financially, but also because cars are weapons of mass destruction that kill more people and destroy more property than all terrorists combined could possibly dream of.
  - jstandard 13y ago
    "Factoring the problem out of the car to run in a smartphone or tablet itself also has its own frustrating problems, because when you're designing an automotive computer system, you can't predict what kind of technology and standards will be available or popular by the time it ships." Would you mind to elaborate on this statement? To me it seems like moving control over some functions within the car, for example music or calling, might make more sense to do on the phone specifically because of the phone's fast upgrade cycle and tie-ins to one's personal information cloud.
yogrish 13y ago
I feel its good concept and addresses current problem of UI in cars. Still, its not a permanent solution as User has to physically touch the screen which is still a distraction while driving. I feel permanent solution would be through a Voice activated controls where you have 360 Degree freedom for yourself. Till then this idea is very much usable for majority of People,Leaving few corner cases as you mentioned("People have a wide range of hand sizes, motor control skills, even number of fingers").
- philwelch 13y ago
  I don't really understand why a car's sound system or climate control can't be effectively controlled with physical knobs and buttons. This touchscreen fad will go away, just like the digital speedometer fad of old.
  - jotm 13y ago
    It's supposed to reduce costs and material use (if everything uses touch screens, they're cheaper to mass produce) and the dashboard design will be simplified, like how digital electrical systems replaced the miles of wires in analog-wired cars. But yeah, right now it's stupid - I can't even use my phone well outside when it's a bit cold and my fingers are dry...
- jccooper 13y ago
  A touch (on a physical object) can make a change in half a second, requires no thinking, and can be done without looking. Voice control (even if it works reliably, which it does not today) takes several seconds and requires thought in composition and execution. Touch on a flat screen may be quick, but requires looking. But it's probably not quick, because you'll probably have to change modes, which will require thinking and several seconds of manipulation. Just put some damn hard buttons on the dash. I know why manufacturers love the screens: they require no tooling, provide lots of real estate for all the doohickeys you want to cram in, and they're hip (Ooh! Like and iPad(TM)!). But they don't belong in cars. Even good ones like Tesla's are bad. Years ago I said I wouldn't buy a car with screen controls. Now it looks like I just won't be able to buy a new car. I repeat: Just put some damn hard buttons on the dash.
matthaeus 13y ago
You're making a bunch of good points. All of them show that there's still a lot to try, learn and discover in this space. And keep in mind: I was thinking of this as being an additional mode to whatever the more "standard" interface would be. You could always have your standard AC controls (on a tactile-feedback-less screen though) but this quick input mode could be invoked when you know what you're doing.
- wahsd 13y ago
  I don't agree that he is making good points. He is making points that are of the current mindset. I can see myself and others like me easily transition to that type of interaction until the next generation of customers, aka, kids grows up knowing and feeling comfortable interacting in that or a similarly smart manner. I do think that the gestures could be broken out into additional interactions, e.g., gestures towards the top do a different thing than the same gestures at the bottom or even have four quadrants that initiate different interactions. I would think that it would require a type of introduction and practice mode that progressively teaches how to interact and also allows a demo mode like display that can be engaged for those who are not versed in that type of interaction. If not being intuitive was really an impediment there would be no keyboard shortcuts. If you can't take a second to memorize some keyboard shortcuts that will quadruple your effectiveness and efficiency then you cannot be helped.
- jstandard 13y ago
  This is an interesting (and beautiful) implementation, good to see another fighting the good fight against distracted driving. I suspect though that you may not have tested this during actual driving situations. The amount of concentration required to maintain 2 fingers or more on a flat, glassy surface while driving is immense and would result in mistaken inputs in all but the most placid of driving conditions. One suggestion is to look at the Cognitive, Visual, and Manual Load framework common in automotive UI design. http://www.esurance.com/safety/3-types-of-distracted-driving http://www.esurance.com/safety/3-types-of-distracted-driving This UI concept has a low visual, but very high manual and cognitive load.
SimHacker 13y ago
Pie menus frame this kind of interaction as pop-up menus, which provide a "self revealing gestural user interface". The menu pops up and leads you through the possible selections. That feedback trains you to rehearse the gestures. Soon you begin to make the gesture without looking at the menu, then wait for the menu feedback to confirm you're doing the right thing. Finally you gain enough skill and confidence through "muscle memory" to make the gestures quickly without even looking at the screen or requiring any feedback. It's best if the menus can provide real time in-world feedback, like applying the effect of the interaction immediately as the menu is tracking. That makes it feel more like immersive "direct manipulation" than indirect "menu selection". It's important that pie menus support "reselection", which makes them much more forgiving and differentiates them from traditional blind gesture recognition, so you at any time during tracking you can change the selection to any item you desire. Pie menus completely saturate the entire possible gesture space with usable and accessible commands: there is no such thing as a syntax error, and you can always correct any gesture to select what you want, no matter how bad it started out, or cancel the menu, by moving around to the desired item or back to the center to cancel. Handwriting and gesture recognition does not have this property, and it can be quite frustrating because you can't correct or cancel mistakes, and dangerous because mistakes can be misinterpreted as the wrong command. Most gestures are syntax errors. Blind gesture recognition doesn't have a good way to prompt and train you with the possible gestures, which only cover a tiny fraction of the possible gesture space. All the rest of the space of possible gestures is wasted, and interpreted as a syntax error (or worse, misinterpreted as the wrong gesture), instead of enabling the user to correct mistakes and reselect different gestures. Even "fuzzy matching" of gestures trades off gestural precision with making it even harder to cancel or correct a gesture, without accidentally being misinterpreted as the wrong gesture. That's not the kind of an interface you would want to use in a mission critical application such as a car or airplane. Another way to reframe the gestural, self revealing and reselectable qualities of pie menus is as navigation through a map, as opposed to climbing up a hierarchical menu tree. Instead of laboriously climbing up a tree of submenus, you simply navigate around a map of "sibmenus" -- sibling menus that you can easily move back and forth between by moving in opposite directions. This demo of an iPhone app I developed called "iLoci" demonstrates the idea, enabling users to create their own memorable maps of "locations" instead of "menus", which they can edit by dragging around, that are related to each other by two-way reversible links. It exploits the "Method of Loci," an ancient memorization technique from the time before iPhones when people had to use their own brains to remember things, in order to leverage your spatial navigation memory and make it easy to learn your way around. http://vimeo.com/2419009 http://vimeo.com/2419009 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci "The Method of loci (plural of Latin locus for place or location), also called the memory palace, is a mnemonic device introduced in ancient Roman and Greek rhetorical treatises (in the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero's De Oratore, and Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria). In basic terms, it is a method of memory enhancement which uses visualization to organize and recall information. Many memory contest champions claim to use this technique to recall faces, digits, and lists of words. These champions’ successes have little to do with brain structure or intelligence, but more to do with their technique of using regions of their brain that have to do with spatial learning." I like the idea of moving away from hierarchal menu navigation, towards spatial map navigation. It elegantly addresses the problem of personalized user created menus, by making linking and unlinking locations as easy as dragging and dropping objects around and bumping them together to connect and disconnect them. (Compare that to the complexity of a tree or outline editor, which doesn't make the directions explicit.) And it eliminates the need to a special command to move back up in the menu hierarchy, by guaranteeing that every navigation is obviously reversible by moving in the opposite direction. I believe maps are a lot more natural and easier for people to remember than hierarchies, and the interface naturally exploits "mouse ahead" (or "swipe ahead") and is obviously self revealing. Here is another video demonstrating a prototype exploring this interface that I developed in Unity3D for Will Wright. It shows both an "iLoci" map editing interface, as well as traditional pop-up pie menus using "pull-out" distance parameters with real time in-world feedback to preview the effect of the selection (plus it also has cellular automata, at Will's request!): http://www.DonHopkins.com/home/StupidFunClub/MediaGraphDemo1.mov http://www.DonHopkins.com/home/StupidFunClub/MediaGraphDemo1...

azinman2 13y ago

You had the same gut reaction as me but if you look at the beginning before he started using it there was a legend of how many fingers map to each icon (no room for text as well?). Beyond spatial memory what's good about this is that you don't have to look anywhere while still adjusting (some speech feedback about what mode you've selected would be good). The lack of sight is the most compelling aspect -- but I can guarantee you my parents would likely never remember the mappings and always have to look at the legend. Even then they'll probably be confused.

jaysonelliot 13y ago
By "cues," I mean visual affordances that persist, not instructions that are shown before using it. It's a violation of one of the fundamental rules of usability, "Recognition Rather than Recall." Look at a traditional dashboard. The air conditioning knob is a different shape and size from the stereo's volume knob, and located in a different place (ideally). Those things make it easy for the the driver to distinguish one from the other, and find them while keeping their eyes on the road. There are other cues that usually exist to help as well, such as a blue-to-red graphic around the temperature control, the volume control being next to other audio features like the radio display, etc. In an environment where the user has to keep a 3,500 lb steel machine safely controlled while traveling 100 feet per second, the rules of usability become incredibly important.
- hootener 13y ago
  "The air conditioning knob is a different shape and size from the stereo's volume knob, and located in a different place (ideally)." You've nailed it sir. Shape coding[1]. If it's good enough for F-14 fighter pilots, it's good enough for my Toyota Camry. I echo the sentiment of others. The OPs heart is in the right place here. Mimicking sight free displays on a touch screen is laughably terrible. Take this picture [2] from OPs post. Why are the media buttons ellipsoids? They're just smaller targets to hit compared to squares! In academia, we've been researching this problem, eyes-free mobile interaction, for a very long time. Particularly in the context of interaction while walking. There are numerous approaches (e.g., Flower menus [3], utilizing pressure [4], utilizing motion [5], the list goes on). The big takeaway is that it seems like more successful systems result from the multimodal approach. OP, you've done some good work here, but consider incorporating other sensors. Voice? A camera for in-air gesture recognition? A biometric sensor that gives reasonable defaults automatically based on learned use of the driver? Touch is only one part of the problem if we move away from shape coding, and we will very likely need to utilize multimodal input if we hope for success... ...or, you know, we could just stick to that whole buttons and knobs thing. ----- [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonse_Chapanis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonse_Chapanis [2] http://matthaeuskrenn.com/new-car-ui/images/statusquo.jpg http://matthaeuskrenn.com/new-car-ui/images/statusquo.jpg [3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRSASiEBw5k http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRSASiEBw5k [4] http://www.mobilevce.com/newsite/sites/default/files/infostore/ibrief_PRESSURE(3).pdf http://www.mobilevce.com/newsite/sites/default/files/infosto... [5] http://katrinwolf.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/MobileHCI2010_foogue_final1.pdf http://katrinwolf.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/MobileHCI2...

cliveowen 13y ago

I'll also add that there are way too many ways of interactions that must necessarily be learned with a substantial time investment. Time might not seem a big deal when dealing with cars since you keep one at least for a couple years, but the mental effort required to learn all those gestures from scratch is so high that it'd definitely put off most users and result in a frustrating experience for a long stretch of time.

0xdeadbeefbabe 13y ago

Maybe the designer could attack the standards problem by writing this for embedded android with the idea that android will fill the car ui space soon (assuming the _embedded_ android docs improve). The UI can provide user feedback with static electricity, and the current could increase with the speed of the car. As for the final point, a ten key resting within hands reach would work fine. You could memorize the number sequence for different commands, and get audio feedback. Talk about a proven UI, basically the telephone. Baby boomers ought to be comfortable with it.

SimHacker 13y ago
From my experience working at TomTom, which uses touch screen as well as voice commands and feedback, and has purchased automotive oriented companies and integrated their products and employees into their own, I've learned that the automotive industry moves at a glacial pace compared to the computer industry. There are both good and bad reasons for this. But the important point is that automotive interfaces are designed to be built into cars at the factory, and used for many years without requiring any updates. Even if updates are possible, most people don't get them. So it's a completely different mindset and approach and time scale than people from the Silicon Valley dot-com startup industry have. Another factor is that the devices built into cars have a very long design and production lead time, and by the time the car comes out, the built in hardware and software is already quite obsolete compared to the smartphone the driver probably owns. Factoring the problem out of the car to run in a smartphone or tablet itself also has its own frustrating problems, because when you're designing an automotive computer system, you can't predict what kind of technology and standards will be available or popular by the time it ships. It's a very difficult problem space, and the stakes are extremely high, not just financially, but also because cars are weapons of mass destruction that kill more people and destroy more property than all terrorists combined could possibly dream of.
- jstandard 13y ago
  "Factoring the problem out of the car to run in a smartphone or tablet itself also has its own frustrating problems, because when you're designing an automotive computer system, you can't predict what kind of technology and standards will be available or popular by the time it ships." Would you mind to elaborate on this statement? To me it seems like moving control over some functions within the car, for example music or calling, might make more sense to do on the phone specifically because of the phone's fast upgrade cycle and tie-ins to one's personal information cloud.

yogrish 13y ago

I feel its good concept and addresses current problem of UI in cars. Still, its not a permanent solution as User has to physically touch the screen which is still a distraction while driving. I feel permanent solution would be through a Voice activated controls where you have 360 Degree freedom for yourself. Till then this idea is very much usable for majority of People,Leaving few corner cases as you mentioned("People have a wide range of hand sizes, motor control skills, even number of fingers").

philwelch 13y ago
I don't really understand why a car's sound system or climate control can't be effectively controlled with physical knobs and buttons. This touchscreen fad will go away, just like the digital speedometer fad of old.
- jotm 13y ago
  It's supposed to reduce costs and material use (if everything uses touch screens, they're cheaper to mass produce) and the dashboard design will be simplified, like how digital electrical systems replaced the miles of wires in analog-wired cars. But yeah, right now it's stupid - I can't even use my phone well outside when it's a bit cold and my fingers are dry...
jccooper 13y ago
A touch (on a physical object) can make a change in half a second, requires no thinking, and can be done without looking. Voice control (even if it works reliably, which it does not today) takes several seconds and requires thought in composition and execution. Touch on a flat screen may be quick, but requires looking. But it's probably not quick, because you'll probably have to change modes, which will require thinking and several seconds of manipulation. Just put some damn hard buttons on the dash. I know why manufacturers love the screens: they require no tooling, provide lots of real estate for all the doohickeys you want to cram in, and they're hip (Ooh! Like and iPad(TM)!). But they don't belong in cars. Even good ones like Tesla's are bad. Years ago I said I wouldn't buy a car with screen controls. Now it looks like I just won't be able to buy a new car. I repeat: Just put some damn hard buttons on the dash.

matthaeus 13y ago

You're making a bunch of good points. All of them show that there's still a lot to try, learn and discover in this space. And keep in mind: I was thinking of this as being an additional mode to whatever the more "standard" interface would be. You could always have your standard AC controls (on a tactile-feedback-less screen though) but this quick input mode could be invoked when you know what you're doing.

wahsd 13y ago
I don't agree that he is making good points. He is making points that are of the current mindset. I can see myself and others like me easily transition to that type of interaction until the next generation of customers, aka, kids grows up knowing and feeling comfortable interacting in that or a similarly smart manner. I do think that the gestures could be broken out into additional interactions, e.g., gestures towards the top do a different thing than the same gestures at the bottom or even have four quadrants that initiate different interactions. I would think that it would require a type of introduction and practice mode that progressively teaches how to interact and also allows a demo mode like display that can be engaged for those who are not versed in that type of interaction. If not being intuitive was really an impediment there would be no keyboard shortcuts. If you can't take a second to memorize some keyboard shortcuts that will quadruple your effectiveness and efficiency then you cannot be helped.
jstandard 13y ago
This is an interesting (and beautiful) implementation, good to see another fighting the good fight against distracted driving. I suspect though that you may not have tested this during actual driving situations. The amount of concentration required to maintain 2 fingers or more on a flat, glassy surface while driving is immense and would result in mistaken inputs in all but the most placid of driving conditions. One suggestion is to look at the Cognitive, Visual, and Manual Load framework common in automotive UI design. http://www.esurance.com/safety/3-types-of-distracted-driving http://www.esurance.com/safety/3-types-of-distracted-driving This UI concept has a low visual, but very high manual and cognitive load.

SimHacker 13y ago

Pie menus frame this kind of interaction as pop-up menus, which provide a "self revealing gestural user interface". The menu pops up and leads you through the possible selections. That feedback trains you to rehearse the gestures. Soon you begin to make the gesture without looking at the menu, then wait for the menu feedback to confirm you're doing the right thing. Finally you gain enough skill and confidence through "muscle memory" to make the gestures quickly without even looking at the screen or requiring any feedback. It's best if the menus can provide real time in-world feedback, like applying the effect of the interaction immediately as the menu is tracking. That makes it feel more like immersive "direct manipulation" than indirect "menu selection". It's important that pie menus support "reselection", which makes them much more forgiving and differentiates them from traditional blind gesture recognition, so you at any time during tracking you can change the selection to any item you desire. Pie menus completely saturate the entire possible gesture space with usable and accessible commands: there is no such thing as a syntax error, and you can always correct any gesture to select what you want, no matter how bad it started out, or cancel the menu, by moving around to the desired item or back to the center to cancel. Handwriting and gesture recognition does not have this property, and it can be quite frustrating because you can't correct or cancel mistakes, and dangerous because mistakes can be misinterpreted as the wrong command. Most gestures are syntax errors. Blind gesture recognition doesn't have a good way to prompt and train you with the possible gestures, which only cover a tiny fraction of the possible gesture space. All the rest of the space of possible gestures is wasted, and interpreted as a syntax error (or worse, misinterpreted as the wrong gesture), instead of enabling the user to correct mistakes and reselect different gestures. Even "fuzzy matching" of gestures trades off gestural precision with making it even harder to cancel or correct a gesture, without accidentally being misinterpreted as the wrong gesture. That's not the kind of an interface you would want to use in a mission critical application such as a car or airplane. Another way to reframe the gestural, self revealing and reselectable qualities of pie menus is as navigation through a map, as opposed to climbing up a hierarchical menu tree. Instead of laboriously climbing up a tree of submenus, you simply navigate around a map of "sibmenus" -- sibling menus that you can easily move back and forth between by moving in opposite directions. This demo of an iPhone app I developed called "iLoci" demonstrates the idea, enabling users to create their own memorable maps of "locations" instead of "menus", which they can edit by dragging around, that are related to each other by two-way reversible links. It exploits the "Method of Loci," an ancient memorization technique from the time before iPhones when people had to use their own brains to remember things, in order to leverage your spatial navigation memory and make it easy to learn your way around. http://vimeo.com/2419009 http://vimeo.com/2419009 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci "The Method of loci (plural of Latin locus for place or location), also called the memory palace, is a mnemonic device introduced in ancient Roman and Greek rhetorical treatises (in the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero's De Oratore, and Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria). In basic terms, it is a method of memory enhancement which uses visualization to organize and recall information. Many memory contest champions claim to use this technique to recall faces, digits, and lists of words. These champions’ successes have little to do with brain structure or intelligence, but more to do with their technique of using regions of their brain that have to do with spatial learning." I like the idea of moving away from hierarchal menu navigation, towards spatial map navigation. It elegantly addresses the problem of personalized user created menus, by making linking and unlinking locations as easy as dragging and dropping objects around and bumping them together to connect and disconnect them. (Compare that to the complexity of a tree or outline editor, which doesn't make the directions explicit.) And it eliminates the need to a special command to move back up in the menu hierarchy, by guaranteeing that every navigation is obviously reversible by moving in the opposite direction. I believe maps are a lot more natural and easier for people to remember than hierarchies, and the interface naturally exploits "mouse ahead" (or "swipe ahead") and is obviously self revealing. Here is another video demonstrating a prototype exploring this interface that I developed in Unity3D for Will Wright. It shows both an "iLoci" map editing interface, as well as traditional pop-up pie menus using "pull-out" distance parameters with real time in-world feedback to preview the effect of the selection (plus it also has cellular automata, at Will's request!): http://www.DonHopkins.com/home/StupidFunClub/MediaGraphDemo1.mov http://www.DonHopkins.com/home/StupidFunClub/MediaGraphDemo1...