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.

Comments

Pointing your finger?

[Transcendent]

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...

Re:Pointing your finger?

[prnz]

A mouse works well while sitting at a desk with a ~20in. monitor displaying at most 2K x 1.5K resolution, but try increasing the screen size by 10 or 100 so that it takes up an entire wall. Now using a mouse requires a lot more effort to move the pointer all the way across (and speeding up pointer movement comes at a cost of accuracy). It's much easier to point at what your looking at, especially if the pointer follows your finger movement.

How about 3D? It's difficult to map a mouse that moves in a 2D plane into a 3D environment. 3D joysticks and other controllers really aren't that much better. People already know how point to objects around them, and that's the whole point of the project; use the communication methods people already know instead of forcing them to learn new, mostly unintuitive ones. Just because typing and point-and-click are easy to learn and work fine with today's computers doesn't mean there's no room for improvement in HCI while everything else getter bigger and better.

Paul

Who will deliver it?

[bunyip]

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.

More human-centric interfaces

[Knife_Edge]

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.

Re:More human-centric interfaces

[JAS0NH0NG]

You bring up a lot of great points, but I don't think that the original premise, that all interfaces need to be simplified, is correct. I feel that the real question is how to design these interfaces to match the (ever-evolving) context of end-users.

Computer pioneer Doug Engelbart said it better: if ease of use was the only critera, we'd be riding tricycles instead of bicycles. However, this should not be an excuse to make difficult-to-use interfaces! We have to look at deeper issues, including usability, learnability, reliability, and expertise, as well as fundamental ones like flow, aesthetics, user experience, and quality-of-life, when designing systems.

After all, the point of building all these tools and gadgets is so that they work for us, and not the other way around.

Re:More human-centric interfaces

[Art Tatum]

You're right but I think what most people in this community are afraid of is the continual insistence that clicking through a bunch of menu items is easier than (and absolutely must replace) simply typing 'make'. I personally feel beleagered by interfaces that make me use a mouse for every task simply because a mouse is More Intuitive (TM).

Efficient vs Intuitive

[jaaron]

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.

Re:Only for "power lusers"

[devphil]

In a mouse-based file manager, you don't move thousands of files one at a time. You highlight all the thousands, and move the group. Why should handwaving be any different?

Similarly, I would expect to point my finger three times: "Starting with this file *jab*, and ending with that file *jab*, move them all over to there *negligent evil overlord wave*."

The QWERTY keyboard is still king!

[toupsie]

Unless you can plug an I/O interface directly to my brain, you are not going to beat the keyboard for computer access. 100+ keys in approximately 1 1/2 foot range. We are very adroitness as mammals with our fingers. Eddie Van Halen and Jimmy Page are perfect examples of this ability. You will never see one of our nearest mammalian cousins, the chimpanzee, do "Stairway to Heaven" without pissing everyone off at the local guitar store sound room.

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.

what is human centric?

[bilbobuggins]

who decides though, what is human centric?
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.

Re:Only works with good one-mouse-button GUI model

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I've been working with Macs for more than ten years, and the multi-button mouse is one of the best things to come to Mac in that time -- command-clicks, option-clicks, click-and-hold requires more effort on a one-button mouse, and if you're doing any kind of involved design work, a one-button mouse is a fast train to RSI-ville. If you've ever used a Mac, you understand how much less intuitive [command-click] is compared to [thumbclick].

I'm sorry, but in my experience, two buttons and a scrolling wheel are the absolute minimum if you want to talk about good interface design, and if you think the interface of the future is going to be a touch screen of any kind...well, have you ever heard the term "gorilla arm?"