Inventing Interactive
The future of the automotive industry has been getting a lot of press lately. It’s starting to sound as if self-driving cars are (umm…) just around the corner. But the future of mobility is going to be a lot more than just autonomous vehicles. It’s about how new technologies and services can be used to solve […]
Microsoft Research recently held TechFest 2013 — an event showcasing research projects from Microsoft Research’s labs around the world. And, although the event’s website requires Silverlight and isn’t the easiest thing in the world to navigate, it’s worth a look — it’s full of all sorts of future-looking research and explorations. (Or – use their […]
Happy new year! It’s the start of a new year, and so the web is flooded with best-of and what’s-next articles. So bear with me if, over the next couple days, I share some favorites here. 5 in 5, from IBM Research, is a thoughtful look at how innovations, organized around our five senses, will […]
Take a look at Connecting — it’s a short film on the current trends in UI, interaction and experience design — and how it’s making us more deeply and richly connected to information and each other. Created by Bassett & Partners, the film is full of great examples of the current state of user experience […]
There’s something a little amazing that happens every time you set up a video projector. All the cables get connected, you turn the projector on, and during the process of placing it, the image may show up on an unexpected surface. It’s cool, so you move the projector around to see what it looks like […]
Here are a couple demos from Microsoft Research that I’ve recently discovered that are full of interesting future interaction ideas. The first video asks what we could do with touch-interfaces if we weren’t limited to finger (and multi-finger) input. What if we could use our whole hand? Called Rock & Rails, the technology demo proposes […]
Distance Lab was a Scottish creative research organization, created with the goal of “bringing together digital media technology, design and the arts to redefine and overcome the disadvantages of distance in learning, health care, relationships, culture and other domains.” Unfortunately, the BBC reports that they have recently closed down. Two of their most publicized projects […]
ImageFlow is a recently published project from Microsoft Research which aims to re-think the nature of image search. Rather than displaying search results in a grid or flat page-like layout, ImageFlow uses a 3D space in which the searcher can explore the content. The project is built upon some fascinating prior research. Specifically, that user […]
Here’s some super-interesting work from the Nokia Research Center showing five future mobile interface ideas. The introduction film is a charming animated scenario called Morph. It demonstrates some possibilities nanotechnologies might enable in future communication devices. But it’s not just dreaming, there’s some pretty hard-core science going on behind the scenes. Much of the vision […]
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 […]
Using a timeline slider to scroll through video to find the moment when an object is at a specific position is awkward and never very precise. Dragon, a project from the Media Computing Group at RWTH Aachen University, looks like a very cool solution. Dragon lets you directly manipulate objects in a video. With the […]
This week, here in LA, was SIGRRAPH 2010 — the annual conference on computer graphics and interactive technologies. The two parts of the event I find most interesting are the emerging technologies and art gallery exhibitions — and there was a lot of thought-provoking stuff being shown. Most was a bit rough around the edges, […]
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 […]
It’s kinda crazy – but kinda cool, too. The premise: as technology gets smaller and smaller it gets harder for us to interact with the devices. The solution: use our bodies as input devices! Chris Harrison’s research project, Skinput, to be published at CHI 2010, is fascinating. It’s fun to imagine what this might be […]