Inventing Interactive
Microsoft recently released a future vision video — looking at how people might get things done 5-10 years in the future. It’s a quite beautifully done piece, full of detail and scenarios. They’ve also put up a website which describes elements of the video in more detail. But what’s surprising is the intensity of the […]
Generated Crazy I started the day reading a fascinating article on generative interfaces, “Can Algorithms Help Design the Ultimate Gestural Interface?” At first I thought it was about generating, algorithmically, user interfaces — something I’d love to see. What would a UI that was designed by a computer be like?! (I searched, but closest to […]
Last week Microsoft demoed Surface 2, the new version of their Surface table. It has some pretty cool features, particularly a technology they call PixelSense, which lets the table visually recognize and scan almost any object placed on it without using cameras. Interactive Things pointed out the similarity to Starfire — a fascinating project I’d […]
Microsoft’s just launched Kinect is generating a lot of buzz right now. But it’s not the platform’s games that are most exciting — instead it’s the implications for future gesture-based interfaces. For example, check out Wes Keltner’s article about the possibilities for Gesture-Based Advertising. But I think what’s even cooler is the degree to which […]
The use of technology, especially mobile phones, in poor and developing countries presents huge opportunities for designers. Mobile banking and microfinancing, as just two examples, can help the poor and unbanked with financial services and business support. But it was only after seeing the work by Indrani Medhi that it I grasped one of the […]
This is interesting… Microsoft is working on another cool way of looking at map and street imagery. Unlike traditional street view interfaces where you look at the street through panoramic bubbles (which can be a little disorienting), Street Slide arranges everything as a flat, continuous, photo. When I first saw it, I thought of some […]
Take a look at this series of commercials from Palm, part of their “Life moves fast. Don’t miss a thing” campaign. They show a kind-of augmented reality, holographic-style mobile UI. Unlike the Chase Blueprint ads, which showed some pretty innovative ideas for holographic interfaces, these essentially project what’s happening on the screen. The point isn’t […]
Check out this interesting video from Microsoft Research on using a pen and touch together in an interface. It’s part of Microsoft Research’s Manual Deskterity project. Running on Microsoft Surface, the demo has some really cool examples of how a specific pointing device can be combined with the more general input of touch. Using the […]
In What Movie UIs Say About the Future, Tony Walt reviews a variety of interface types featured in some recent movies. His discussion on Complexity was particularly interesting — especially in the context of the iPad and its move towards simplicity: I’ve noticed that UIs in feature films are continually getting more elaborate and complex. […]
The announcement this week of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 Series has been getting a lot of attention. And, the reviews have been generally positive. It’s funny how, as designers, we’re so often skeptical about Microsoft. My friend Eric Brown saw the announcement and emailed me, asking, “Am I crazy for liking this?” I feel the […]
This morning, looking at the Flickr blog, I read this cool post about Flickr Everywhere. — a collection of new ways Flickr is being integrated into offerings from Apple, Google and Microsoft. The item that really caught my attention was the way that Microsoft is integrating Flickr content into Bing Maps. A type of spatial-search, […]
Last year I was in London with some friends and we ended up having dinner at Inamo in SoHo. They’ve developed an interactive ordering system that uses your entire table as a display, using ceiling-mounted projectors The basic dilemma with these sorts of restaurants is that the novelty, whatever it may be, is what attracts […]
Lukas Mathis, for UX Magazine, recently wrote an interesting article: Realism in UI Design. It takes some of the ideas from Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics” (a book I remember making a big impact in the UI world when it first came out) — and looks at those concepts apply to UI design. The examples he […]