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Making Computing More Human-Centered
buzzdecafe writes "Interesting article in InfoWorld about the future of interface technologies, e.g. pointing your finger to move files around, etc. The story focuses on MIT's Project Oxygen, which aims to make computing more anthro-centric. (Check out the Visual Interaction stuff.)" We've written about Project Oxygen before.
If you can't figure out how to use a computer by now then you don't deserve to use one, plain and simple. Windows, Linux, Macs... all three are the simplest they've been in years.
The question is if it is better to point your finger to move something on your screen, or the mouse. Using your finger requires more effort and arm movement (which could tire some people out), yet using the mouse only requires a flick of the wrist... which to me would be 10x faster than pointing with my finger...
Sounds alot like in minority report.
I really don't think were ready for that, computers aren't really fast enough. When you have fingers moving around, the interface must be moving REALLY fast. I mean, you can't wait for windows to open or applications to load... it would be really frustrating.
As an Anthro-American, it's high time we had better access to them new-fangled corm-puters. I bought an Apple Macintosh, took it home, and all it did was sit there looking snide.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
What if you gave your computer the finger would it get upset and crash :-)
This (in particular, speech processing) is the place. Other than improved graphics / simulation (which is mostly dependant on the video card, in any case), user-independant speech processing and AI are the only things I can think of that will need the processing power that is coming down the track.
I've following Project Oxygen for a couple of years, I seem to remember an article in Scientific American about it some time back.
Anyway, despite the big dollars spent at MIT on it, I'll probably see it on the next generation cell phone from Nokia or Ericsson. Some of the ideas are pretty cool, I can't wait.
In other words, I believe that as lot of fundamental research will happen here (I live in the US for the moment), but that engineering and delivery will be elsewhere.
Use your finger to move the mouse cursor, you must.
Efren Belizario
headspeak.com
The idea that all machine interfaces can be simplified to the point where they are intuitive enough for any untrained human to use seems questionable to me. The problem is, computers as tools allow abstract tasks to be performed that were not even possible before they existed. They aid humans not only in performing such tasks, but present ways of thinking about tasks that was not possible before. This may or may not have any equivalent at the level of hand gestures or speech. The machines may force us to adapt to some degree, but I would like to point out that at this time humans are vastly more adaptable than even the most sophisticated information technology.
I mean, renaming a file to a new directory by pointing your finger is fine if you just want to rename one file. But to suggest that this is an improvement over the command line if you've got thousands of files to shuffle around is completely ignoring the computer's ability to do mind-numbing repetitive jobs quickly and accurately. Instead it's insisting that a human interact at every mind-numbing repetitive step. This is not progress, people!
I'm still waiting for programs that keep track of how often there ran, and then when the mouse cursor approaches them the OS is smart enough to begin loading that application based on the speed of the mouse cursor and location and the amount of time it ran, and the time frames that its ran in.
If you can't give us the type of interface used by Tom Cruises character in the movie don't wast our time. Until then I'll be happy with using the keyboard...heck they can't even get a decent voice interface working.
Personally, I don't really care if I can wave my fingers in front of my computer screen, or if the mouse follows my eye movements or something like that. I would much rather have a very efficient interface with the computer, which is why I often use just the command line (my laptop runs RedHat and I almost NEVER use X windows). It's just very efficient.
But it's not very intuitive. And that's the tradeoff. Intuitive interfaces are usually not very efficient when you really think about interfacing with the computer system and getting a lot of work done with little effort. I don't think there a problem with either approach. In fact, we need both. That's one reason I do like Unix/Linux -- when I need intuitive, I run X-windows (okay, it's not as intuitive as a Mac, but it's better than nothing), when I need speed and efficiency, I'm on the command line writing a script or perl or something.
Anyways, my point is, there are going to be lots of geeks who say, "heck, who needs finger pointing? I don't even use a mouse!" But that's the wrong attitude. Intuitive interfaces have their place and need to be improved upon.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
Personally, I'm more interested in the MUI -- Mental User Interface. The command line/language combination is hard to beat (unless you're talkin' porn, of course.)
What I'm looking forward too is the self-aware machine with acceptable communication skills and the ability to do contextual reasoning. This would be far more useful and interesting than more visual stuff as concerns my needs.
Of course, talkin' porn might have merit too.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
What's the market? This is a technology that will make computers more intuitive and easy to use, and this guy wants to know what the market is? I'll tell you what the market is: it's everyone who wants a computer, not a hobby.
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
The zsh command line is the easiest, fastest, most efficient interface ever devised (though home/end support would be appreciated). KDE/GNOME tie for second. Windos and macintosh interfaces are down the line aways.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
This only works with good one-mouse-button GUI model.
Ehen a finger is used to drag, press, select, tap, double tap, e erything is fine on a touch sensitive 2005 AD flat-mat computer.
but OSes that require multiple mouse buttons mandatorily as part of GUI (all osses except NeXTStep OS and the MAcintosh OS) will be left behind.
Why?
because as Steve jobs predicted (and I) back in 1982... a computer will never know WHICH FINGER you used.
Unless it knows WHICH FINGER was used to tap with, only GUIs that are based on a one-mouse-button priciple can be truly integrated into these futuristic computers that are nothing more than flexible flat dinner-mats (no physical keyboard, just a temprary video overlay keyboard if needed at times.
i have mentioned this 4 times on slashdot, once every year or so.
Nobody seems to undestand why I keep warning people to remember to use one mouse button in designs so that we can progress.
If you never used a mac or NeXT, you will never understand how a gui works well with one mouse button so dont bother flaming this. You need to try it for a while to understand that 3 4 or two button mice are not good to demand as minimum GUI design principles.
Please tell them not to do it like how Tom does in Minority Report.. If I have to use both my hands to operate the PC, I wouldn't be able to, er.. massage myself...
geek page at KY speaks
The common human can manage the 1 1/2 foot distance of a keyboard fairly well as evidenced by the number of God awful personal web pages on Geocities. Even though I use the most "gooey" Graphical User Interface, Apple's Mac OS X, if I want to manage data, files, etc., I jump to the "Terminal" and do it through the Command Line Interface. Even with Mac OS X's speech control and IBM's Via Voice software, I can still type faster than I can talk -- in an intelligible manner.
I always find it funny in "near future" films how complicated the input interfaces are. They are dancing their hands in a virtual space acting like data had a form that you could grab and move. What a waste of effort. If you have to flail your arms around for 8 hours, you are going to be exhausted...but at least you will only have to buy one ticket to fly Southwest. The amount of effort required to manipulate the 100+ keys of a standard QWERTY keyboard is minimal. Though I have never had problems, I am sure the keyboard design can be improved to prevent repetitive injuries to certain users. We are all different shapes and sizes in various regions of our anatomy. Its hard to pick the "average human being" for a generic device.
The keyboard is a powerful input device. Even with the 130 year-old QWERTY keyboard, human kind has been able to create wonders -- without it, we would have never made it to the moon. Compared to the original 1872 keyboard layout by C. L. Sholes, my clear plastic keyboard that came with my Dual G4 is not much different. I know it so well, I don't think I will ever use the Dvorak keyboard but my future kids might.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
In 1985 a head mounted ultrasonic eyeball-mouse existed for the mac.
... BOOM you accidentally knock everything around that the cord interferes with as you yank it.
It was patented, and soon the patent runs out. A human neck is VERY VERY steady and accurate. Tape or fuse a broomstick to a human head or helmet and see how non-trembling and steady a long rod is. Well this ultrasonic pinted was a three resceptor ultrasonic headband receiver that extrapolated what the user was looking at on the screen and MAGICALLY moved the mouse to wahtever they looked at!
It cost about 300 bucks for the mac version that had a cord running to headband. They never released a cordless version. The cord was a miserable shackle because suddenly standing up, if forgetting the cord, or kicking back away from the desk on a rolling chair
Again.... a single mouse interface works best because if they aever added "strong-blink" detection for a clisk or some other clamping mechanism based on jaw angle the computer gui would run flawlessly.
Single mouse button designs allow all sorts of non-messy input methodologies.
Why do we need "files" in the first place? Why not replace our file systems with something more like a database and then be able to querey it?
Instead of remember paths to files users could just "store them on their hd" and not even know what happens after you click on the save button.
if you think about, the whole reason humans are in the position they are in is our ability to adapt to things NOT 'human centric'.
by the same token you could argue that we have developed in such way, so well suited for our environment, that EVERYTHING is 'human centric'.
the fact that we can pick up a stick and use it for a tool, does that make us more adaptable or does it make a stick more 'human centric'?
given that we can interact fairly well with just about anything, how are they deciding what actions/motions are more native to humans?
they didn't answer this either, from the project site it seemed that most of the 'improvements' focused on voice commands and having the computer do menial tasks for you, meaning less interaction, not easier interaction.
Gary.
As R. Kelly sang: "I believe I can fly. I believe I can touch the sky.
I think about it every night and day. Spread my wings and I fly away.
I believe I can soar..." You can soar if you believe in yourself.
Our local weatherman can move entire hurricanes around with a wave of his hand.
Or is that MIT page just an overblown dramatic way of saying, "Hey! We're doing usability testing!"
Somebody once said that the only intuitive interface was the nipple. Everything after that had to be learned.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I still maintain faith that Rover, Shelly the turtle, and all the Microsoft Bob gang will show us the way to a new userfriendly future!
Everything will be taken away from you.
...tell your computer to move a folder inside another, and just by pointing with your finger, it would happen... a natural language, multilingual conversation system that can understand and respond to normal speech... a self-configuring, decentralized wireless network... He points to electricity as a resource that works this way, in that it's ubiquitous, but also unobtrusive.
I don't know about him, but I generally interact with electricity by putting little plugs in little sockets. The interface makes it quite difficult to accidentally do something different from what I wanted, and there's nothing left up to interpretation. Things always work exactly the same way, unless something's gone terribly wrong.
With a good interface, you can tell a new user how it works, and the user will be able to predict everything that will happen when they do anything with it, and will be able to do the things they want to do reliably without ever doing something unintended.
Who needs all these newfangled pointing devices anyway? Why, back in the day a keyboard was all you got! Mice, trackballs, and now pointing with your finger?! I tell you my son, these are perverse times, and the sons of men are growing dumber by the generation. Technology takes the place of wit and cunning even as we speak. I think it is good for people to use their keyboards, and avoid the mouse at all costs. Now we want to bring EVEN MORE user friendly nonsence aboard this sinking ship we call Computer Science? Let me tell you this: We will all fall prey to the fowler known as Bill Gates (the gates of hell)! Return to your roots before it is too late, and we all become finger pointing Micro$oftie minions of hell itself! Aaaah for humanity!
Their game against Spain isn't until tomorrow, but right now they're down on the corner selling t-shirts and driving around in their souped-up Civics screaming and honking their horns. I fucking hate this stupid shit -- save it for the game, you retards. Anyway, this is Canada, where getting woken up by soccer-crazed Koreans is unheard of. And where the fuck did they all appear from, anyway? I didn't realise there were this many Koreans in the entire country, let alone one city...time to plant mines around the lame-assed English language schools, I guess. Risky, but rewarding.
Imagine the possibilities that this will open up for us! Go from clicking on the keyboard to actually using a writing utensil, some kind of light based pen. I know many people that hate the layout of a keyboard and they would love to be able to write instead of typing. Besides, you have more control that way, you can add in comments, cross things out, and do all sorts of things (write in the margins) a lot easier than on a normal computer keyboard.
And hey, instead of looking at things on a bright computer monitor that hurts your eyes, how bout we get some of that new epaper that will display things you're writing. You can have a stack of it sitting on your desk ready anytime you need to write something.
And hey, instead of having that bulky mouse to move things around your computer (where files and folders are so easy to lose in the maze of your hard drive) we could have a large group of drawers organized in a certain way... we'll use alphabetically for now. Anytime I get finished with a piece of epaper I can put it by hand into those "file cabinets" (trademark pending biotches) exactly where I want to put it. I'll never lose a note again, since everything will be in one place and I don't even have to worry about losing everything to a hard drive crash.
The future is now! Lets get people working on this project! I can see the end of the tunnel already! We need funding!!!
oh wait...
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson
The voice recognition was noticeably laggy, and in the intelligent meeting clip, the guy has to say "computer" twice. I remember dictating my final essay for high school english using Dragon Dictate, and its accuracy and speed didn't even require me to slow down or speak deliberately.
Also, the "sketch" demo was rather lame, even if it makes great PBS material that even computer-phobics may enjoy watching. The little 2D physics simulator looks exactly like a program (the name escapes me) that I had, again, in high school. We used to spend hours making little goldberg machines instead of working. What's new here? They've added a little pen-style pointer? That's hardly a new paradigm for human-computer interaction. With the kind of lofty language that the project oxygen site uses, I would've expected more. They claim that current interfaces are cumbersome and require us to do a lot of the work for the computer, well, having one guy wearing a headset microphone and using a keyboard to issue terse monotone commands seems pretty unnatural to me.
I can't wait to jedi mind trick one of these things.
"These aren't the files your looking for"
Error: move aborted: files not found
"You can go about your business. Move along."
Resuming job [537]: wget -r http://www.autopr0n.com
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
Once again, human beings are making the assumption that the world in which we live, must be centered around us. We live in an ecosystem which includes us as a HUGE varible; too often we are assuming that we live outside this system.
By making computer interaction, "more human", we ignore the millions of other lifeforms on earth that could benefit from a SYNTHESIS of our differences to create a better computer, not just for us, but for everything.
Ryan Anderson.
Randerson@ubc.ca
PETA
Veg-Dot
Computers for women.
Anyway, despite the big dollars spent at MIT on it, I'll probably see it on the next generation cell phone from Nokia or Ericsson. Some of the ideas are pretty cool, I can't wait.
In other words, I believe that as lot of fundamental research will happen here (I live in the US for the moment), but that engineering and delivery will be elsewhere.
--
Ask the Ya-Hoot Oracle Anything!
If you've ever actually tried it, gloves-and-goggles VR sucks rocks as a way to get anything done. You can shoot. That's about it. Sculpting and air guitar have been tried, but without force feedback, they are nothing like the real world. Building anything is hopeless.
Mice won out because you can move a little pointer precisely. Gestures with a pen also work. But gestures in free space, no.
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The ONE new feature I would like best on my computer is for it to know what I mean when I say "Stop! No! I didn't mean that!"
Here's a thought - imagine a system where you use journaling and checkpointing to track *all* changes to both filesystems and program states, and give the user the ability to roll back changes arbitrarily and to great distance.
This would definitely be useful in recovering from catastrophic user errors, and might even be implementable without having to rewrite every application in the universe (take an image of an application's processes' memory spaces, and either carefully note the state of all file descriptors (especially device handles), or wait until they're in a sane state before checkpointing).
One of the cluster job distribution tools I've come across already does this to some degree ("condor", which can be set up to do checkpointing if desired).
Well, you have more than one finger don't you, so why not? It is quicker to just use a different finger or click another button than do double, triple, long, or gensturized clicks. And if your left hand is free, then key combos can also be added. And please, people can handle more than one button... Or are you implying we should also stick to one button keyboards?
I've been able to know about the next windows BUI (Body User Interface), directly from their ultra secret research labs!
First of all, the next windows version will not recognise keyboards, mice, touchpads etc., as they're obsolete devices, that the new generation of win-users should gladly forget.
Of course, a virtual keyboard will be included for compatibility issues, only it will be hidden, so that the average user will never be able to find it.
The hardware device used in this interface will be a full set of position sensor that the user should put on his body, each of them connected to the computer via his own wire; user will have to stand in front of a huge monitor and move all of his body to send commands.
The software interface will be an unlimited 3d space, of course, with an avatar of each user connected to the system ad well as small 3d "icons" of each program available: users will have to grab the icon to launch the program, or to kick them to see an alternate menu (right click-like) or to hit them with the head to select them for other reasons.
Common windows commands will have their shortcuts, with a triple somersault being "shutdown", scratching your armpit being "close" and of course what on some unices is called three fingers salute will be achieved with one (the) finger only, and will allow you to log in, to log out, to check for unstable programs, to shutdown, etc. etc.
Resistance is futile. :)
MIT used to be cool. Writing Spacewar for the PDP-1 (an 18 bit computer with no stack that takes up ONLY 17 square feet!), hacking lisp, building robots.
The more computing power you throw at MIT, the more lazy they get, the more wanky their projects get.
I think if you gave the original hackers the machine power of today they would have built Maria (Metropolis) by now.
graspee
If my memory serves me well, I heard Negroponte talk about this sort of thing in the early 70's. I remember his example as an admrial directing nuclear submarines with arm gestures. Glad to see some progress.
Read about the Narval framework at http://www.logilab.org/narval/ not quite working yet, but very interesting.
It occurs to me that what makes the geek-crowd so adept at using computers is the fact that we are able to communicate with it on it's own terms. A computer is quite used to handling streams of characters, i.e. streams of discrete elements. It's not at all good at putting things together as a cohesive whole -- that's what us humans are good at. Those of us who can talk to a computer at it's own level (e.g. by using the commandline) are able to best manipulate it and make the best use of what it's good at. If we were to express ourselves to a computer using natural language, we'd be once again constrained to the world of large cohesive wholes by our language, rather than being able to dip into the world of small elements...
... and to do that, you need to talk to it in it's native language...!
...
Why would we possibly want to remove the one element that makes a computer so incredibly powerful -- the ability to handle many small, repetitive, discrete items -- and replace it with what we're already good at, i.e. visualising entire systems? That's pointless. Use it for what it's good at
Project Oxygen looks like a few steps backwards to me
In the many years of using computers since I have arrived at one conclusion; for me the most important thing about interfacing with a machine is minimizing the amount of 'wrestling with the machine' which I have to do in order to accomplish my task.
I'll show you what I mean by 'wrestling with the computer'. Suppose that I want to copy all of the emails that I have in my nsmail directory to a cd for archive purposes. I type 'burncd nsmail' to start the process from the command line in Linux. (burncd is a wrapper I have put around the 'mkisofs' and 'cdrecord' command line programs which presuppose them with the correct options for my system.)
Contrast that with using a cd burning program from a GUI:
I am going to stop the GUI example here; real GUI cdburning programs are far more complex than I want to write about. The few that I have used make the process of burning a cd quite a lengthy and complex process from the users point of view. I don't want to wave a mouse around pointing and clicking for 30 seconds; I want to burn a damn CD!
The amount of time and effort that it takes to get the computer to do what I want it to do is what I mean by 'wrestling with the computer'.
There are times when a GUI is the way to go: I would hate to try doing a PC board layout from a command line. It is easier to move chips around with a mouse than to type 'move U1
Minimum work on my part - maximum output from the computer is what is important to me as an experienced user. I want the computer to do as much work as possible - I want to do as little as possible.
Computers are the intellectual equivalent of a fork lift; they allow me to handle far heavier intellectual tasks than I would be able to do without one. The problem with a fork lift is that you have to know what you want to pick up and move. The same is true of a computer; if you don't know what you want to do - you can't do it.
A fork lift is a dangerous machine because it will happily amplify the strength of a fool. In a similar fashion a fool with a computer can do tremendous damage in the intellectual world. An interface which puts obstacles in the paths of fools - while letting people - who know what they are doing - quickly and easily accomplish their tasks is ideal. In a very real sense that is what I like about unix; it doesn't impede me - but it keeps the people who don't know what they are doing from being able to do too much harm.
See CHI2002 conference proceedings, p. 724: "The Sound of One Hand: A Wrist-mounted Bio-acoustic Fingertip Gesture Interface". Give it 5 years.
I can't help but to skim over the post that say GUI is nothing but filler, command lines are where it's at, human centered will be less powerful, etc, etc... But they all miss a minor point-- Human centered computers are supposed to be easier to use, thereby making them more accessible to a wider range of people. You can argue from the elitist techno nerd side of the line all you want, but the majority of the world is still made up of people who don't want to take the time to reprogram their VCR's time, let alone screw with an unpolished interface. And unlike catering to the techno geek, building easier to use computers makes more money. You doubt it? Flip on the TV and see who Gateway, Compaq and Dell's commercials are catering to. "Dude, you're getting a Dell!" sure as hell isn't aimed at you or I. A talking cow? Really. Joe AOL doesn't care about open source. He doesn't really even give a damn about microsoft's monopoly (other than the "MS is evil" opinion everybody has). Mozilla? Star Office? Who gives a crap!? Joe doesn't. He'll use what is easy to reach and use, unless there is something overwelmingly excellent in the product. MS makes their stuff at very least easy to reach by integrating everything into their OS. Ease of use is an opinion, so I won't go into that, other than to say there isn't a mass defection from MS yet.
In the grand scheme of things, Joe makes company 'X' money. You DON'T. Thus the push to make computers easier for him to use.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
The entire scope of this thread discusses how to make computers and their interfaces easier to use. How is this off-topic?
And the man has a point... I'm imagining Tom Cruise in Minority Report shoving around pages of data and punching at icons floating in ether... Is that really where all this human computing is taking us? Is that where we want to go? The whole visual interface idea is nice, but the physical interaction part can definitely use a little tuning. Tablet PCs, anyone? I like holographic projection as much as the next guy, but to manipulate a widescreen's worth of data with that much movement? Sheesh...
And to the moderator who moderated this offtopic, your ignorance is only exceeded by your stupidity, which is why I meta-moderate ALL trolls and flamebaits as unfair. You want Karma? Take some of mine. After all, I have a life.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
A human neck is VERY VERY steady and accurate. Tape or fuse a broomstick to a human head or helmet and see how non-trembling and steady a long rod is.
Now design a poster in Quark using an illustration generated in Strata 3D or Illustrator, all while using this interface. The only person who should be excited about this kind of device is yr local chiropractor.
[with] some other clamping mechanism based on jaw angle the computer gui would run flawlessly.
Oh Jebus, that's just what I need -- an interface that literally makes me grind my teeth. As if the whiplash weren't bad enough.
Single mouse button designs allow all sorts of non-messy input methodologies.
Heeeee....if multi-button mice keep devices like the above off the market, put 20 on mine, please...
i still fondly remember having your good post up my asshole last night newrbob