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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.
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...
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 :-)
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.
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.
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I've always preferred ed myself.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
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...
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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.
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.
Since this kind of user interface has been sucessfully studied and used since the 80's, how is this news?
I distinctly remember viewing a demo from a major educational institute in the 80's where an individual was seated in front of a large projection screen.
The dialog went something like this:
"Move the yellow ship here (pointing)."
"Which ship?"
"The yellow ship."
"OK" [Moved]
"Delete this ship (pointing)."
"OK" [Deleted]
"Add a red ship."
"Where?"
"Here (pointing)."
"OK" [Red ship added at the pointed to location]
"Move the blue ship next to the red ship."
"Next to which ship?"
"The red ship."
"OK"
ad infinitum.
satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
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!"
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?
/WHAT/ files are ON my HD rather then having to f*cking search through the ENTIRE HD just to see if something MAY even exist or not! Yeesh. Being able to say "Oh, hey, that folder has 20GB of files in it, WTF???" Is rather nice, rather then "Err, uhh, 20GB of space is missing, but this damned non-existent file system will not let me figure out what it is."
/love/ it though. ::rolls eyes::
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.
Yah, lovely idea there bub.
And after the 10 thousanth or so 'file' is stored, then what? How the f*cking HELL is the user supposed to FIND anything? Do a database search?
heh.
Dude, I can REMEMBER where my FILES ARE faster then a bleeming database can SEARCH for them! (I know, tested this, unless you have yourself one VERY fast ass SCSI RAID array, I can beat your butt hands down)
This is because if you are using a flat storage model (no directories and such) you have to search through all of your files (ick) or at least all of your files of that particular type (still ick, and users still have to ID files by extension or at least 'type' )
If you use a non-flat storage model (such as any SANE person would) then the entire system becomes rather pointless.
And quite frankly I perfer to actualy KNOW
I guess the Hard Drive manufacturers would just
As somebody who is at times rather anal about keeping his files in their proper place, well heck, it is convienent.
A flat file system is the equivlent of a legal office having all of their papers scattered together and hiring some young'in to go shuffle through them all when ever anybody in the firm wants a particular paper.
It is much easier just to have them organized by that client's Lawyer's name, then client case type, and then client's name.
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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.
...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.
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.
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).
Ah but what if you could do all those things while sitting at the stip club or the ball game in between 'plays'... how about ordering up the bio on that girl or the stats on the player who just scored... then filing away the best parts for your scrapbook/journal plus the video footage your eyes just recorded?
That's what I'm talking about. Enjoy real life to the fullest and bring your office with you.... currently we only have the option of sitting in the office and living real life vicariously through cheap versions on the internet.
This of course only applies to the ones of us unlucky enough to have to work for a living but lucky enough to have a job.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
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
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.
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.
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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.
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Remember, we're talking about MIT here.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
That autoporn site SUCKS. It's just a bunch of links to free pictures on the WEB(yuck). The descriptions make you not want to click on any of the links. Real geeks drink their porn from the firehose of USENET.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!