Surface, iPhones, Wii …. and Birth of the Cool
To me, it almost fulfills my desire to roll time back and live through eras of seminal changes and lasting legacies. Like the birth of Cool Jazz!
Miles Davis nonet recorded twelve songs of their famous album ‘Birth of the Cool’ in 1949 and 1950 and featured path breaking instrumentation and innovative arrangements making it a seminal album in the history of cool jazz.
I feel those parallels because like cool jazz, after Surface, iPhones and Wii, gestural interface are suddenly getting formal and commercial recognition that they lacked so far.
As quite aptly stated by Dan Saffer in his new book, Designing Gestural Interfaces, we are leaving behind the era of HCI paradigms that were built in 1960 and 70s. During that period, scientist and engineers like Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay, Tim Mott, Larry Tesler and others at Xerox PARC developed the core interaction notions like Windows and Copy/Paste that we use a zillion times without realizing. While these notions will not just go away in the new era, they will first be first supplanted and then quickly overtaken by many others that use the whole human body or external sensors or new input devices.
But there are some things to watch out for. Surface, iPhones and Wii may be more fun, more flexible, more natural and more nuanced, but they are still not the best things to use for certain scenarios.
For example, consider when you have to enter large amount of data. As of today – till improved voice processing takes care of this for good – keyboards are significantly faster to enter text and numbers. Incidentally, our Human Factors Professor quite confidently declared in mid 90s that the keyboards will be history by the end of millennium. Looks like predicting future technology trends is harder that we think!
There are a few other areas where these new interface may not be the most conducive option. Gestural interfaces are way to visual (comes with the desire to offer a rich experience). Lack of haptic affordance and feedback can be confusing and if the user is visually impaired, then the interface can be a handicap. Reliance on physical gesture also brings in to focus the variability in human abilities across populations. Not everyone has the strength necessary on some gestural interfaces and not everyone has the dexterity to manipulate even simple features like keypad of iphones. In some situations, the necessary gestures to perform interactive tasks may be an inappropriate thing to do in public.
But if designers keep this in mind, the explosion in gestures-driven computing offers impressive opportunities to live through an era of emergence of new interaction paradigms. Again, as Dan says in his book, Tap is the new Click. So true!
Comments
Surface computing is evolving at a rapid pace, every single day,to provide a great collaborative platform for people to interact over different form factors.
Surface applications are not trying to replace a traditional data intensive application, which is better off with whatever is available today, rather they are trying to redefine the way social interactions happen. From iPhone to Ideum MT, SMART Table, (MS Surface) Superbowl application are just pointing to where this technology is heading.
Posted by: Giri | July 13, 2009 11:09 AM