This time around, though, it’s supposedly complete application platform, the g-speak by Oblong Industries. It’s definately the most impressive video I’ve seen, since the platform seems like complete solution, not just some weird hack, and the hand tracking seems to work flawlessly. The downside being that you need to wear stylish gloves from the future to use it, I guess they could use some consumer style hand tracking.
When the dust settles and all awesomeness is placed aside, I still fail to see how that is actually anything but cool toy (could appear at CNN, though). Compared to display+mouse+keyboard that is just awkward and slow, the traditional combination beating the G-Talk, 10 to 0.
Check the video from full post.
Read more…
User Interfaces, Videos
minority report, User interface
Yesterday evening was a complete disaster. I’m currently residing at Austria and the internet connection I have at the moment in my flat is.. well, just not up for the task. It’s wireless and provided by one shady D-Link canister, for me and 8 other people, which makes the thing whimper and die every now and then. So you basically have to get up from your ass and do a hard reset for it, every time your internet connection dies. It’s good excercise though. For the body, not for the mind.
That itself is annoying but the actual problem yesterday was that for some reason the FTP (and every other port besides HTTP) is blocked somehow. Either that or the D-Link just collapses every time I try to upload anything bigger than 10 kB. Last evening I made some modifications to couple of files and when I started to upload them only the first 10 kB of every file were actually uploaded(!), leading to incomplete files and myriad of error messages. Tried to solve the issue till 1 AM with no luck.
So, today I spent uploading everything (upgrading the wordpress installation in the process) back to the server and now, finally, everything is again up and running. Finally.
Blog
Blog, downtime
Decided that the default Wordpress theme is… well, default. Some time well spent produced this theme, iNove. Still not what I want but it’s closer. Liking the random posts, I’d guess it’s going to have some kind of impact to the time spent at the site.
Usability wise, still too much small fonts and the header needs to be rethinked but I like the sidebar. So, this is the look now and perhaps the next one will be the one.
Blog
Blog, theme
The video itself is quite old, circa 2007 (old in internet time and/or in multi-touch time), but I wanted still to post it since it illustrates nicely the way how at the moment multi-touch seems to be more of an evolutionary hit and miss than actually a step forward. The video in question is quite nice project, from couple of students from India, their aim is to create whole new Operating System based on multi-touch. Now, that’s quite a goal, and all the respect for that, but it seems that in the same time it’s also the downfall of the project. At least when looking it from the perspective of usability .
Head on forward for video and more analysis
Read more…
Articles, User Interfaces, Videos
article, dead, Multi-touch, problems, video
Remember the coolness dripping user interface from Minority report? (oh, come on! who doesn’t?) Now the new company called Mgestyk Technologies is poised to take that into consumer reality.
Now, as the you might seen the Johnny Chung Lee Wiimote interpretation, Mgestyk system seems to use the same principle, illuminating the users hands with IR-light. However, they have taken it to new level using something I’d guess is some sorts of blob recoginition, which figures out the orientation of the hands, numbers of fingers etc. This in turn seems to be hooked to something that sends keypress events to the system.
I can see one problem with this type of systems. It’s not analog, like you can see from the driving & the flying games, which is a damn shame. Though this I would presume is could be fixable; just imitate joystic events.
Although I would say that I would be much more interested of applications that would be usable to day-to-day gaminglife. Like, say, driving the car in a game without the actual wheel… it’s nice as a toy but it doesn’t have anything on real-life-psysical-wheel-and-pedals-combo. Sure these kind of applications will find their way to advertising (and to CNN :P) and later on to say TV controls but I hardly can see them as the only way of controlling, at least not yet. As an way of enhancing user control on the other hand… In my last article I’ve talked about enhancing natural behaviour and the using it in the world of gaming (posture guided gaming). I would say that “bodygesture based control” work best on the secondary means of control, that overlaps the primary (possibly haptic) means of control, giving the user more precise (and in some cases and natural way of fine tuning things.
Check the video after the break.
Read more…
User Interfaces
concept, product, User interface, video, wiimote
It seems that the Saturday Night Live agrees with my earlier post (Multitouch is useless, dead) and proceeds to ridicule the awesome benefits of multi-touch that we enjoy today. Check the video from the full post.
Read more…
Multi-touch, Videos
dead, Multi-touch, SNL, video
I’ve been throwing this concept back and forth for about 6 months now, thinking if I should just publish it or try to develop it further before publishing. Well, since I don’t have the proper resources nor the time to develop it further at this point, maybe it’s just easier to publish it. So here we go, natural zooming for digital displays:
You know how you look n picture and there is n detail you want to see, like the subjects face? You squint your eyes and maybe look closer to the picture. How about harnessing this natural habit to user interface? And why hasn’t no-one done that yet?
Here is the basic idea in rough scetch:
Read on.
Read more…
Articles, Usability, User Interfaces
article, behaviour, concept, Mobile, natural, zooming