Photosketch: Internet Image Montage provides a simple way to make image composites by doodling a picture, adding labels and then letting the engine scour the Internet for suitable photos. Once it has found the most appropriate matches, it composites them together.
I can see lots of awful e-cards and Powerpoint presentations coming out of this, but it would be very useful for putting together prototype sketches for installations and services and it is a pretty remarkable bit of technology.
All of us anthropomorphise our machines, perhaps no more so than the car and the computer. Hi, A Real Human Interface from Multitouch Barcelona (an interaction design group that explores natural communication between people and technology) is a charming example of how we think about computers and interfaces from a human perspective.
Whatever we might know about the technology and how it works, we talk about the “server having some trouble” or our computers “having a bad day” or “going crazy”. We’re so biologically programmed for interaction to be with other beings, it’s very hard not to think of the little man in the box.
(Via @LukePittar and all the little people who run messages back and forth in the intertubes.)
Joel Johnson’s exclusive (on Vimeo?) video and interview with the folks at Schematic about their new touchwall shows them dealing with some interesting public multitouch issues. I hate the marketing crap that goes with it and the inevitable Minority Report reference (please, stop making that reference multitouch people), but the idea that what they’re really interested in is “the social interaction in front of the screen” is spot on.
Apart from the fun of playing with what looks like a giant iPhone screen, the key thing about large multitouch screens is that more than one person can use it at once. If it just replicates a bank of individual screens it’s missing the point of having one big one. Connecting people together in social play and interaction can be really engaging and it will be interesting to see what developers and designers explore in this area.
The other issue that they talk about in the video is how to solve the identity problem on such a device so that you don’t have to walk up to it (or “into it” as one of the interviewees says) and type in a log-in. RFID tags come to the rescue, which means the wall knows who you are as soon as you’re close enough to use it.
If we’re going to make comparisons to Minority Report, that screen was an individual experience operated alone by Cruise’s character. By contrast a multi-user multitouch screen feels to me to be much more Star Trek or James Bond to me and about using collaborative workspaces with the added layer of data feeds.
I’m going to be giving a talk over at Interaction Forum ‘09 at the Design School in Hildesheim next week (Tuesday 26th). If anyone is in that neck of the woods, come and say hello – maybe send me a tweet and we can catch up.
I’m going to be talking about play as guiding principles to interactivity, but I’m much more looking forward to listening to the other two speakers, Jona Piehl from Land Design Studio and Mark Hauenstein from AllOfUs.
Great to see magneticNorth’s new website live. Brendan gave me a sneak peek of it yesterday and I love it.
The navigation is very playful and intuitive. Actually it is intuitive because it is playful. You basically scribble a doodle and this makes a mask into which a piece from their portfolio opens. You can then click on that item to view more info about the work or simply make another scribble to look at a new piece. The navigation across the top is a history that you can move back and forth through or reset.
What is nice about the whole thing is that you just don’t have worry about doing anything ‘right’. You can scribble any shape and you can scribble over the top of other scribbles and everything automagically sorts itself out.
Go and have a play yourself and tell me what you think.
[UPDATE: Quite some debate started about this, which I'm very happy to be part of. I wrote a long response, which is almost a post in itself, but decided to leave it in the comments.]
I haven’t had the time to have a dig around and play with it yet, but those I know who are using it seem to be producing some great work. I also haven’t dipped my toe into the lake of C, though apparently you can learn it in 5 days (ahem).
The new release is quite a restructure and includes several new libraries, but the biggest news in the latest release is that it now officially has support for the iPhone. More details and guides from Jeff Crouse and Memo Atken (who made the Jackson Pollock iPhone app in the video above).
No more excuses. Time to get my hands dirty with XCode.
Sometimes the focus on technology for the sake of technology just gets in the way of thinking about how people actually live. Any mobile device I carry around will have a screen and a camera, whether it be an iPhone or a projection onto my retina. There are ample uses and opportunities for augmented reality with these, so why would I want to carry around a tiny projector too?
In the ‘Sixth Sense’ set-up, I would need to keep my body still to keep the projected image from moving all over the place and I need to have some kind of tracking blobs on my fingers too. Let’s assume the devices are combined. Again, why the projector when I already have a screen? So that I can wave my arms about as a gestural interface? In public?
Like VR, the central paradox of ‘augmenting the senses’ is that the technology cuts back the senses. We’re not just heads floating around without bodies, we interpret the world through our entire bodies. Anything that reminds you that you’re using a mediating technology gets in the way of those senses and what you’re trying to do.
The success of multitouch interfaces is that they make the interface invisible. It’s still there of course – someone has to set up the metaphors of ‘pinching’, etc. – but when it works well, you don’t think about it. But they have to work well too – the slightest lag or misinterpretation of a drag as a click soon becomes a frustration.
Clever(ish) as it is, Sixth Sense doesn’t make much sense. I get a bit sad when I see these kinds of demos get such a big response at TED, because it’s an audience who should know better and should be in front of the curve, not behind it. This should be especially true from Maes, whose MIT page quotes her as saying “We like to invent new disciplines or look at new problems, and invent bandwagons rather than jump on them.”
(And Pranav should spend some time working on his MIT Web page).
The Holodeck remains a fantasy for Trekkies and we’re still not yet jacked into The Matrix (or are we? Oooh.). Guys going to enormous lengths to build stuff for their girlfriends, on the other hand, has long been part of the human condition.
World Builder by Bruce Branit is about a guy who builds a holographic world for the woman he loves. There’s a reason it is holographic, which you find out when you get to the ending, so I won’t spoil it here. The film was shot in a day, but then took two years of post-production to finish off. Who says computers make things quicker?
The main reason for blogging it is because of some of the gestural interface elements in it. The overlay buttons and keypads are the usual fare and I remain unconvinced that jabbing at a floating holographic keypad button would be a useful UI approach, although it always looks good on screen. There are also some controls like spreading the fingers to enlarge and object and using the fingertips to rotate a virtual control knob that are already in use in gestural interfaces.
I’m not sure I have seen the idea of being able to pick up things like colours and textures on your fingertips and apply them to objects yet though in an existing multitouch interface. A few desktop applications use that kind of sticky mouse idea and 3D and 2D applications kind of use it with tools and colour/texture chips, but I still haven’t seen it all that smoothly done. Adobe seem to screw this up further and further with every release rather than making it easier. (Does CS really stand for ‘crappy shit’ rather than ‘creative suite’?)
The main issue with a gestural or multitouch interface would be keeping track of the identity of a particular finger tip once it has left the touch panel, it seems to me. But maybe someone has already solved this and it is in use – let me know if you know more.
(Thanks to one of my ex-students, Nico Marzian for mailing me the link).
Great collection of “free interactions” and insightful commentary from Chris Noessel on the Cooper blog. Basically these are little interactive extras, sometimes by-products of a design, sometimes seemingly deliberate (like the iPhone example above). Things that you like to just play with and that have no obvious, functional ‘use’, hence the term “free interaction”.
I don’t think we should be surprised that things like these make a difference – play and playfulness is critical to an interaction whether it is physical or virtual. Whether it is the weight of a nice piece of cutlery in your hand or an elastic interface element on-screen, they all make the everyday object and usage more engaging. It’s often an unconscious affect going on too, but designers who understand this do very well indeed.
It is also a different mindset. It’s interesting for me that Noessel calls it a “free interaction” because that comes from a position that ‘normally’ interactions should always have a tool- or purpose-like function. That mindset seems to be oblivious to the idea that creating pleasurable affect is an important and useful function.
I think it is great, although strangely newbie (he is no newbie), that he ends with a Call To Action for interaction designers:
Since we want our designs to be humane and, presuming they fulfill their utilitarian purposes well, emotionally satisfying, I suggest that designers begin to include one free interaction in their designs to enable the channeling of energy and simple expression. Design this interaction such that:
It’s “free,” i.e. having no significance to the task or content
It’s discoverable in ordinary use of the product
It’s quick and repeatable (Less than half a second.)
It’s pleasant
Almost everything I’ve been involved with in interaction design has been about trying to foreground this playful aspect.
Karl reminded me of two new games for the Playstation that depart from the normal 3D extravaganza. The first is another EyeToy game called EyePet. Basically you draw with a special pen and your doodles become 3D and part of the mixed-reality world of the game and your virtual ‘pet’.
It’s very encouraging to see this trend towards games that designed from a point of view of ingenuity rather than pure 3D rendering power. There’s nothing wrong with full-on 3D games rendered in luscious detail, but I don’t feel games as a medium progress much when that’s the only focus.
There is little difference between the basic gameplay of Wolfenstein 3D:
RT @oo Apple startup chime. An interview with the sound designer, Jim Reekes: http://vimeo.com/9370716 <-- small sound, lots of thought. 10 hrs ago
Simon McIntyre (@cofa_online) is looking for case studies of successful online teaching strategies to showcase: http://is.gd/aKYEv #edchat10 hrs ago
The @feedly/Chrome combination is superb. Now my default reader. 10 hrs ago
Only just noticed that the @NASA_Astronauts are occasionally tweeting from space. Hi folks up there! 12 hrs ago
@tweetie Does that mean Tweetie 2.0 is in the works? I always feel downgraded on the desktop version after using T2 on the iPhone. in reply to tweetie12 hrs ago
@userfocus I got that - sorry, I wasn't being narky, just answering. Do you think they're synonymous? I think there are key differences in reply to userfocus13 hrs ago
, except that it is in a plain, wireframe and stickman style:
: