October 18
Enhancing natural behaviour - Natural zooming, anyone?
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.
The main concept is to use the natural behaviour of moving the picture closer to your face when you want to examine some parts of it closer. That’s when you would ever so subtle zoom the picture closer and closer. Of course you would still have the problem with the point of interest zooming out from the picture. There is however, couple of possibilities to this problem too; first of all, you could have touchscreen where the user could i.e. tap the focus point and then zoom just by moving the display closer to the face. Another solution would be to use accelerometers or camera based solution to define is the display tilted in some ways/which part of the picture is closer to the face. If we are looking a detail closer to, say right edge, we have tendency to bring the right edge just slightly closer to our eyes, tilting the picture in the process so that the left edge is actually farther away. Of course this is not 100% sure way (but it is damn close to as transparent user control as one can get), so we would need secondary way of control, i.e. touchscreen.
Now, let’s think of this same scenario but on modern 3G phone. First of all, you could use the forward-facing (the one that is facing the user) camera to track the proximity of the face AND you could use the same camera (and maybe some IR-emitters) for eyetracking, to see at which point the user is focusing on when she is looking closer at the picture, thus keeping the point of interest always in the view. Plus, you could always determine the point of interest has been zoomed out if the user suddenly zooms back out, and then in. You know the drill. Now, she would be able to control the screen completely transparently, and completely natural way. The device simply enhances the natural behaviour.
Now, what else could you do with this kind of natural behaviour enhancement?
Well, for starters you could implement it to cameras as well (which goes pretty close to the area of recent Sony Ericson patent, although it seems that their patent is just about keeping the subject in the frame). You know how you can control the things, you have in your frame, by moving the camera closer and farther from your subject. Like the time you tried to get everyone in the picture, even though there was no space to move back to and you had to keep the camera an inch from your face. Again, natural behaviour, even though in this case it’s completely opposite from the picture zooming process, you move the camera closer as you want to zoom out. So, why not and harness this? When taking a picture, when user moves the camera closer to his face, zoom out carefully.
Again, here is a rough scetch:
Of course you would probably still need the traditional zoom (specially with big focal length zooms) but by taking the natural behaviour and enhancing it we could make a digital point-and-shoot which does the zooming far-far better and more accurate than with digital buttons. (which has always been one of the crappiest thing in point-and-shoots)
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Interesting idea. If you haven’t already, you should check out a paper from CHI 2008 called “Lean and Zoom: Proximity-Aware User Interface and Content Magnification” by Chris Harrison and Anind Dey. Theirs was on a desktop system rather than mobile but the idea is similar. (I’m sure they’re not the first to think of it either — I remember seeing the same thing implemented in a virtual reality system 10 or 15 years ago.) It’s a neat idea for the mobile space… you should make an iPhone or G1 demo app.
Nice blog (found just found it via Google Alerts).
Thanks! (for some reason I didn’t get alert for your comment :/)
Yeah, I wish I would have the time and the skill to make proper demo app, unfortunately I’m far too busy (or I’m supposed to be at least :P) making other project, which is practically all the effort I can project to programming right now. But that’s why I put it there, if someone else who has the time and the skill gets interested of the idea and decides to create demo app. It’s all there to help the “community”.
My only problem was that I wasn’t sure if I wrote it the way that people could actually understand what I’m talking about, without rambling on for 10 pages.
Haven’t read that paper, just downloaded and will definately be checking it out!
Definately will be checking your blog too, since I’m working with touch panel applications at the moment.
-M