Slashdot Mirror
Tactile the Future of GUI?
aaronvegh writes "Slashdot readers have been griping a lot lately about the lack of an alternative to the desktop GUI. In his latest Alertbox column, Jakob Nielson (love him or hate him) is proposing that tactile, phsyical interfaces will be the next evolution in how we interact with machines. An interesting read, and a relief from the tired "the desktop GUI is dead, and we'll replace it with....uh....""
Does it even need to be said?
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
I won't take any advice on GUI design from a website that looks like THAT!
I see nothing in this article that shows what exactly a physical paradigm would do better than a desktop one. Truthfully, I don't think desktop when I'm on a box, it's just hierarchically organized folders. Which makes alot of sense to me.
My tactile feedback is a mouse and a keyboard. What's yours?
Sure, you could have an NES style powerglove. But whatever it is, it comes down to just pointing and pressing buttons (be they virtual or real). For me any 2D environment is best for that (loss in time pointing/touching at something way in the background or even behind me in 3D).
My desktop works fine, and so do most people's. They just don't want to admit it.
That looks like it might have limited use - I can't see the good old GUI going anywhere soon (unless commandline makes a comeback).
that tactile, phsyical interfaces will be the next evolution in how we interact with machines.
:-)
what, like the abacus?
Last thing we will need though, is smell feedback. Lord knows what my trash bin smells like with the junk thats in there. And worse yet, my porn folder. Ewr....
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
...right here.
I forget what 8 was for.
That's all I'm asking. I don't want to "rub my junk" just to get my cursor moving.
I always have trouble coming to grips with new technology.
--
I romp with joy in the bookish dark
I'm glad i stick with console. All we need now is a tactile console. Complete with 101 key 'interface' So i can push the correct buttons in correct order to run a command.
to get a directory all id need to push would be key labeled 'l' and key labeled 's'.
wow what a great innovation.
I don't want UI advice from a guy who keeps using bold on almost every sentence.
I don't understand why would really even need to see stuff that badly. If programmed properly, like in Clisp with some "insanely great ((C) Steve Jobs) voice recognition and natural language parsers, we should just have to talk to the computer. No typeing, no mouse clicking, no eyes strain. If we want some information back, it could tell us, print it, or display it on a projector or something. Sort of like Star Trek?
Thanks for bringing back painful memories. I'll hate those optical pens you had to point on the screen all my life.
From reading the article, it appears they're more interested in tactile interfaces for non-PC devices. I really don't think this will affect the gui any time soon, too many people need to be able to see what they're doing.
It's easy to stand out when the general level of competence is so low.
I would love a GUI similar to the one used in Minority Report.
An alternative would be a simple OS interface similar which uses radial menus like those in Never Winter Nights.
If you rip a DVD, will it punch you?
I found a link in the article to be almost as interesting as the article itself. This is a link to Saul Greenberg's site at the University of Calgary where he has a collection of user interfaces, most of which have been designed by his students and include video examples. Here It Is
I've been using my Logitech iFeel mouse, which has tactile feedback, for over a year now. I like it a lot; it's reassuring that widgets in windows are "bumpy". I guess it's like moving to a real keyboard after having used a membrane keyboard. It even works in some games, most notably Black & White which actually had missions that would only appear with a force-feedback mouse.
But unfortunately, iFeel mice have been available for a long time now, but it doesn't seem like they're catching on. People don't seem to want to spend even the extra $20 or so for the feature.
"NanoMuscle is a company that makes very small motors that are an order of magnitude stronger and smaller than traditional electrical motors, yet they use a fraction of the electrical power and they're much cheaper."
http://nanomuscle.bigstep.com/:
"25 for $900"
Lies.
No really, it's right here in my desk. It's a writing instrument, sometimes called a "pen". Who knows why?
Did you know you can drive north or south in any direction? It's true!
RealAroma(R) introduces a whole new dimension to the man/machine interface game. The dimension of smell. With the RealAroma Drive(TM), and RATML (SM) (Real Aroma Text Markup Language) you can share smells in real time, over the Internet, with olfactory buddies all over the globe. Because all smell conversion is done locally in the RealAroma Drive(C) itself, bandwidth requirements are extremely low and even users of embarassing 14.4k baud modems can enjoy the odors you concoct.
This all seems so futuristic and fantastical? It is, but the fantastic future has arrived. Our patented 3-Vile(TM) System allows us to precisely control the amount and "flavor" of each and every smell. And because it's digital, you can sniff your favorite smell anytime with the click of a mouse. Teamed up with the RATML protocol, you can now communicate with smell, just as you do with words, pitures and sounds. Here are some of the features:
- Long-Lasting, "no residue" Formula
- Modern Design
- SCSI Interface
- Firewall Support
- Open Architecture
Be sure to see the Developers' Pagegive yourself a large enough monitor with 4 splitscreens, you're set
Touchscreens are the way to go if you're thinking of a new paradigm in physically interacting with a computer. Sure, touchscreens have been around forever, but do YOU have one? Why not?
It would be neat to see more 'toys' come out that interfaced with my computer in some way... but to say that people will give up their keyboard and mouse for a Teddy bear is a bit of a stretch.
-ZOD-
So what will pop up ads feel like in order to get our attention?
"Exxxcellent!"
Uh huh, whatever Burnsy.
So there's going to be a time that I plug Barney into my PC instead of a mouse?
...until PDA's have a tactile interface. I'd love to smack my PocketPC in the middle of a meeting and have it go 'WaaaaAAAaaaa!'.
You'd better be as good looking as Cruise. If everyone has to watch you waving your arms about all day long through a transparent screen you'd better not be ugly.
-- SIGFPE
phsyical interfaces will be the next evolution in how we interact with machines
Isn't this how things worked before we had computers?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
From the article:
> You control the computer by doing what you want (to
> play peek-a-boo) instead of asking the computer to
> do it.
Hmmmmm.... funny, but I thought the whole idea of computers were that you ask them to do stuff and they do it.
In fact, this whole article makes little sense and I find it hard to define what the point of the article actually is.
Ohhh yaaaa!
I'm afraid that if Windows, for instance, were to become interactive in a physical sense that my computer usage would fluctuate seasonally. I mean, I can't very well have all those windows open when it's cold outside, now can I?
brrrrrrrrr
The angel in the oatmeal.
Anyone else think this is Jakob trying to encourage this just so he might, one day, know what it's like to touch a human of the opposite sex?
The next logical leap from the desktop paradigm would be to model an interface after your thought processes. Rather than have an analog to the way you WORK, you should have an analog to the way you THINK. This would speed up user interaction and make things feel more "natural".
Unfortunately there are two potential problems. First, we still have yet to understand human thought processes very well. We might be able to get around this, as there have been some successful attempts to model things without full understanding (various PIMs have done this, like Lotus Agenda).
Second, if we did understand them, they might be different for every person. That's why the desktop has stuck around for so long: it's a wide common base that many people can relate to. But who knows, maybe there's a common ground in the human brain as well.
Most people interact with the world in a combination of ways, such as visual, auditory and tactile. We have grown up in a society, or two, that teaches us to look for information and to listen to information, then react using our hands or feet. Part of this is tradition, part of it is in our very nature, how we have evolved. We tend to rely heavily on visual stimulation, pattern recognition and recognizing things out of order as well.
The GUI works very well for most people, over the years cave paintings, scrolls, and books have done a pretty good job of transfering information & knowledge. The computers GUI is just following a centuries+ tradition that works well for most people.
So, I think the GUI will be around for many years to come, no matter how much some will try to reinvent the wheel. The people who advocate a different type of UI ought to do a bit more research into the other side of the equation, the human being. We haven't changed enough over the past 80,000+ years to try and force a paradigm shift onto human beings. There is still a lot of room for improvement in the GUI, it just takes research and a visionary to really improve the current state of available GUI's.
Being visionary is not about just having a neat idea that seems new to you, that is maybe invention.
I think there are some important things to point out here. Microsoft may make things easier to use, but harder to understand. With all of the hand holding, wizards, and simply doing things for you, the end user is becoming less and less knowledgable about computers. They are becoming more and more educated about "The Microsoft Way".
Some say that Linux gui developers have yet to crack the gui solution. I say that Windows has failed to crack the Command Line Interface (CLI). Why is a graphical interface always seen as the evolutionary step? Hasn't the gui gone about as far as it can go? I think with our current technology, it has. Linux has a GUI and a CLI, both are powerful. Windows has a GUI and a hobbled CLI.
People talk about the next generation GUI. No. Talk about the next generation interface. See, the GUI was made simple because the people using computers were new to them. Do you think that will always be the case? Can you picture living without automobiles? How about telephones? Electricity? It can be done, but we are of the generation(s) that take these thing for granted because they have always been a part of our lives. The people who had to transition from not having these things to using them on a daily basis were uncomfortable with them. This is happening with computers. When I grew up, there were no computers. I transitioned OK, I went into the field. My siblings did not. Kids today are growing up with them, so computers are not foreign objects. They won't need the hand-holding OS, they aren't afraid of the machines. (Show them a record, or an 8-track tape if you want to see fear and confusion) :-)
People always talk about making the interface simpler. I think that the interface will not become simpler, it will become a little more complex, simply becase it won't need to be simple anymore. This is just my theory, and I hope I live to see it become reality.
I also understand the need to look for the "next great thing", but I don't think we have properly used the interfaces we currently have (GUI with CLI). Although the interface in Minority Report was pretty cool, throw a CLI on there and use the gloves with a virtual keyboard, and you are in business.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
You had your shot a while ago Jakob, and yes flash makes it harder to put a website on a cellphone, wristwatch, neural implant and television simultaneously, but you know...sometimes we just want something cool to look at.
Even when there is an obvious and undebatably better system (not saying, necessarily, that tactile is, just posing a situation) Americans are extremely unwilling to move themselves outside of their bubble of safety. Some examples... metric, dvorak, etc. The mouse and the keyboard may be slow and even the most "ergonomic" setups have proven to be really damn unergonomic, but that doesn't really mean a thing to the vast majority of the American populace. Hopefully, American stubborness won't adversely affect the development of tactile systems, I'd really like to see what they can do.
sig.
This would work extremely well if the primary way in which we sensed our physical environment was by touch. Unfortunately for this technology this is not the case, as a majority of the sensing we do is based on sight. This technology may have applications in niche markets (for the visually impaired, as an aid to a visual interface like the ifeel mouse mentioned above, etc.), but it does not seem to me that it will ever be able to really break out to as wide an audience as its creators might invision.
"Hey brother Christian with your high and mighty errand / your actions speak so loud I can't hear a word you're saying"
It's probably because the command is an example of a non-command user interface
This is a fine example of how Nielsen's work is, in my eyes, nothing more than a load of buzzwords, contradictory in places, but ultimately not meaning much. Tactile interfaces? Those would be interfaces using touch. We have those. Just because Nielsen is called a 'usability guru' doesn't mean that we should listen every time he opens his mouth.
Having studied Usability, I have to say that it's probably one of the most useless parts of a Computer Science degree. Interface design, and usability, has always been about making things intuitive - there's not much more that you really need to say about it, as long as you have half a brain and you know some users with significantly less.
The point of a computer is that it is a very easy way to implement interfaces for various different applications. I don't want a Barney-style "Punch your computer's head to reboot". Barney is a toy. My computer is designed to do things far superior to playing peek-a-boo. And, consequently, it has a more complex interface, consisting of two components: one designed for speed (keyboard), and one designed for ease of use (mouse). I'd like to see anyone here try typing at 50wpm by squeezing the relevant parts of a large purple dinosaur, although I can see it now... you want to type B so you squeeze Barney's bo!!ocks... speaking of which, that is, I'm afraid, a lot of what Nielsen spouts.
Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error.
A more interactive interface, though, where the computer can understand your movements like a human does, could be very useful in specialized applications - imagine being able to use a gestural interface when you're, say, an airline pilot?
and we'll replace it with.....bash! bwahahahaha
-----------------------------------------
Remove the Greed which plagues mankind.
Why?
You'd be tired within 10 minutes flailing around wildly like that. He could've done the operations that he did with a mouse and a video editing program with 1/4 the effort that he took to gesture wildly at the (Annoyingly) transparent screen. Not to mention the downside that they actually showed in the movie (When he went to shake the inspectors hand the computer read it as "Let's throw this window into obscurity")
What a foolish operating system.
With my dying breath, I curse Zoidberg!
The Sony Aibo has a tactile, physical interface. You train the little dog and cat robots by rubbing and tapping them in various places, or by showing them their big red ball. It's not very effective, although some people think it's fun.
Computer in 70's- encapsulated entire room, required hardware changes, and worked VERY slow
Computer in 80's- Slowly moving to desktop, allowed limited proccesses and worked with 5 1/4" disks
Computer in 90's- started the internet revolution, causing many people to get very rich on paper, and then loose it all.
computer in 00-now - Allowing people to work on projects, work more productively and acheive more results in less time.
Is this really needed, a interface that would allow people to sit at home, or in their office and never have to move. to feel the mouse actually drag something, and drop it. Does it make things easier?
does it allow MORE productiviy then we currently have?
will is allow for acutal automation of daily tasks?
(can't we aready do this now?)
while I do think that it is a great vision, i don't belive that it is truly a needed evil, and i belive that this is going to be more of a hassle then it would be worth. The old addage says, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
The majority of /. readers are computer literate, and very familliar with it's interface. I would guess that the majority of them also agree that the interface is relitivly simple to understand, and the directory structure (windows, and *NIX flavors) is easy to navigate. Why change that, so that you can see your computer smile at you? Is that needed to write program in Python? Do you really want your computer laughing at you, when you mispell the word "monkey", better yet, for a windows machine, do you want to see it cry (or better yet, see the facial expression of someone having a heart attack) when it locks up?
Me, personally, i could care less about a facial expression, or mouse feedback. I don't want to see everyone drifting in to a world of illusion, and this is what this is going to be the begining of. You think that kids are overweight now, imagine when they can have their friends over virtually to play? they just sit in front of a computer while the droids are in the yard kicking the ball around, and they are at the interface controling them. Don't care about moderation - Just want comments!
It is a bit too much exercise for the computer geeks... I don't think anyone can substain a debug session for an hour of that without sweating.
... how is it that all these geniuses keep missing the point? Computers help us work with information. Information is cerebral, not physical. People don't WANT to interact physically with information.
The desktop metaphor holds widespread adaptation because it was ALL WE EVER HAD. Prior to electronic information handling, people typically handled paper information on their desks, complete with calculator, blotter, etc. The metaphor translates directly. A different metaphor requiring MORE physical interaction does not translate at all, nor does it follow the "information is cerebral" trend.
The mouse was a neat innovation because it demanded LESS physical attention than the keyboard. The mouse is NOT a necessary part of the desktop metaphor; how many of you use a pointer on your physical desks or workbenches? The mouse simply freed us from some physical burden. Speech recognition will free us even more. Thought recognition will free us even more.
Simply put, the natural UI evolution as it pertains to information handling is toward the LESS physical.
That never caught on. Probably too much work.
I bought one at Wal Mart years ago, it was on the discontinued shelf.
People are lazy.
whatever - who is the bigger idiot? CmdrTaco
or Jakob Nielson?
the world will never know.
Actually, that ring menu's older than NWN. Think of a little Squaresoft classic called "Secret of Mana".
I saw a demo by Alias/Wavefront in college a few years ago that featured interface concepts that they were working on at the time. The presenter demo'ed several ideas that attempted to rethink interaction with computers on a simpler levels than the complex mechanical avatars and the ilk the author of the article discussed.
Among the ideas that were presented was the idea of using both hands to "mouse". The presenter pointed out that selection boxes (when you click and hold to select a group of icons, for example) don't make sense because you can't modify the upper left/right hand corner of the box once you click and hold. He used the analogy of two hands holding and stretching a rubber band to suggest that two mouses/hands would be able to manipulate the selection rectangle more adeptly.
To me, the natural evolution of GUIs is to incorporate such natural tendencies as using both hands. Command lines have given way (for many, not all) to GUIs where you manipulate icons because an "object" is easier to conceive and handle than a location path on a hard drive. If we interact with one another using gestures and expressions, then it would be only natural to work with a computer this way.
Ivan
There is no graceful way to eat an egg salad sandwich.
In my humble opinion, I believe we've had three great paradigm shifts in desktop GUI: 1) the mouse, 2) "windows" (as created by Xerox and then perfected by Apple) and 3) touch screen / force feedback.
I like the idea of a device "morfing" to meet your physical-use requirements. I'd like to see the morfing concept applied to school text books. One device that can store and present any text, article, etc. Can you imagine how cool your geography term paper would be if you could project the topology and structure of say, the moon or the Grand Canyon in 3d!?
I would also like to see an AI GUI companion: sort of a personal assistant that learns from and eventually can predict your behavior. I have seen some articles on Microsoft's AI work; hopefully, there are some others working on this technology.
Wasn't it supposed to have some sort of revolutionary interface & filesystem? I seem to remember it should have been released in some form early 2002. What was it called?
IMHO LCARS looks cool, but sucks, do you imagine yourself coding there?
I think it's a neat idea, but you have the problem of people's haptic abilities (i.e. sense of touch) worsening as they get older. A touch-driven interface might really suck for some elderly person already trying to get a grip on computers in general.
Not that interfaces that use sight or sound will be invulnerable to aging-related isses, but it is something to keep in mind.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
I am still waiting for an interface built on mortal combat. To enter data into accounts payable you need to get to level 2. Access the CRM system requires mutilating a few bad guys and finding the secret entrance to the CRM system.
Not very efficient, I know, but fun!
i was forced to disable the tactile interface for my pr0n collection....
And apparently thirsty. He purchased a 44 oz. cherry slurpee and a pack of Winstons after filling up with about 12 gallons of gas at the Overland Park Quicktrip on Southwest Trafficway.
WHAT IS THE MEANING OF IT ALL???
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Too much repetition.
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Too much repetition.
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Too much repetition.
In fact, the article itself violates a number of points he hammers into people's skulls as 'essential' to ui design in his books. For example, the text is sans-serif and it spans the entire page. sans-serif fonts are very difficult to read when there is a large amount of text, and it is well known that people absorb content better when the columns are narrow instead of wide- look at newspapers. I also remember trying to find stuff on the Sun website that he was responsible for... *shudder*...
anyway, i like the concepts behind the non-command user interfaces- but i'm not sure they are applicable in all situations. if i'm coding, a physical interface is not going to help me code any better or faster. a holographic projection might- because i would be able to arrange files around me in 3d, physically pull them forward and make changes, etc. (kind of like Minority Report).
i think the idea should be to allow the user to develop his or her own interface. information is information and should be separated from the ui completely - a user's habits should dictate an interface that's appropriate to how that user thinks. in other words, a machine may start out functioning one way and then turn into something else as the user uses the system. what's intuitive for one may not be so for the other.
for examples of this, look at the user interface clips on the calgary site linked to by the article. all the women are designing stuff like bugs on leaves and fish tanks that change color to let you know you have mail. the guys are designing things like lounging monsters. now, take these things out of context. how the hell am i supposed to know to look at my fishtank to check my mail?? (this, by the way, is another violation of nielsen's ideals.)
if any of these are taken out of context, they are completely useless. i guess my point is that the interface shouldn't be a static thing, but rather, should be completely controllable by the user.
That's ok, Jesus likes me anyway.
Why are gestures all of a sudden popular? Opera has them, and I accidentally closed all my windows. Black & White had them but they were the worst part of the game, I could never get a spell to cast right. We've got a keyboard with 102 "gestures" on it sitting in front of nearly every computer. Make use of those instead!
Travis
because it works.
Gestural interfaces have largely vanished
because its time consuming, unweildy, and too device specific.
A mouse and a keyboard might be outdated, but dammit, they're simple. I can only try to imagine someone trying to type on a computer with a Barney Plush doll! And the thought of someone hacking a force feedback mouse and throwing my arm out of socket if I bumped over a window border ... okay so thats a little far fetched.
Sometimes I think we spend too much time trying to invent shit we don't need and not enough time making the stuff we use now actually work.
Your eyes have millions of receptors. When you see something like a screen, most of them are actively processing the screen. That is HUGE bandwidth. You are used to using it because your brain is processing vision constantly, so is very accurate.
A tactile interface would rely on a few hundred receptors on a handful of fingers. (pun intended) Unless you read braile, your fingers aren't that sensitive. Your fingers aren't used to being used as a primary interface, and is therefore not that accurate.
Aural (sound) interfaces are much better because they have a significant bandwidth (not as high as vision, but better than touch) and we are used to using them. That's part of why the two most-required output interfaces are a monitor and speakers.
Input interfaces are the same. The best way we have for output is our tongue (seriously), second is our hands. So our two preferred input interfaces should logially be voice and hand. We are used to typing, and always dream of the ultimate speech-control interface. Or you could go to a tongue interface, but I wouldn't want my co-developers to share it.
So as far as User Interfaces go, I think we should strive for better GUIs that can be augmented with sound and tactile feedback.
Just some thoughts.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
This isn't just implementing a tactile GUI over our current methods (filesystems, folders, root, etc), but would require a complete overhauling of how OSes work.
I'm not sure, but something like that might require the use of sophisticated A.I. systems that can respond well to analog actions (like pressure or heat or even sound)...if tactile GUI's are the future, it might be a longer time coming than Mr. Nielson hopes.
The majority of /. readers are computer literate, and very familliar with it's interface. I would guess that the majority of them also agree that the interface is relitivly simple to understand, and the directory structure (windows, and *NIX flavors) is easy to navigate. Why change that, so that you can see your computer smile at you? Is that needed to write program in Python? Do you really want your computer laughing at you, when you mispell the word "monkey", better yet, for a windows machine, do you want to see it cry (or better yet, see the facial expression of someone having a heart attack) when it locks up?
Me, personally, I could care less about a facial expression, or mouse feedback. I don't want to see everyone drifting in to a world of illusion, and this is what this is going to be the begining of. You think that kids are overweight now, imagine when they can have their friends over virtually to play? they just sit in front of a computer while the droids are in the yard kicking the ball around, and they are at the interface controling them.
Don't care about moderation - Just want comments!
The difference between a CLI and a GUI are, really, baggage from a prior generation of systems that should be discarded.
A future interface will be graphical because that allows for more immediate and intuitive use of information. I can know, at a fraction of a glance, that I have Groupwise, Mozilla, and Winamp loaded as "user applications," as well as a working iFolder, netshield, & a couple of other background apps.
The biggest improvement for this will be keyboard integration. I want to push a button (windows key or equivalent) and have a "command area" pop up, which is designed to work with the GUI.
Take the Windows setup and add anything & everything that the Linux CLIs have that it doesn't. Then rework the entire thing from the ground up, remembering that the CLI will work *always* with the GUI, and a user should be able to do everything with the CLI.
A generation after this, and we can replace the command area with voice recognition. The voice subsystem will just feed commands into where the CLI goes, and it'll work exactly as we imagined it would as kids.
concerning mice: using a mouse is terribly inefficient. The only thing it has going for it is that it is universal. I can use it to point (badly), draw (badly), write (very badly) - just about anything in 2-D.
However, when I watch myself aim for instance for that 5mm x 20mm area in most apps that says "File", I realise that fast as it is, it actually represents an effort - it requires appreciable hand-eye coordination. This is not really a problem (at least not for me), but it is an unnecessary annoyance - it should be effortless. It's also the reason I learn about 20+ keyboard shortcuts as soon as possible for every app I know I'm going to be using 2+ times a week. I always Alt-Tab through my apps on Windows, and if I want to see the running apps, I unhide the autohidden startbar with the Windows key, rather than the mouse.
My favourite apps are the ones where I don't have the touch the mouse at all. Although there are some exceptions: mouse gestures in Opera are great, mainly because they require hardly any hand-eye coordination - the pointer just has to be somewhere in the window I want to do something with. Same with wheeled mice - successful, because it requires far less effort putting the pointer somewhere in a windows and "wheeling" up/down, rather than aiming for the proper section of a 5 mm scrollbar.
Having said all that - this is just one element of modern GUIs, notably interesting because it's both so successful and so bad.
yes, we have no bananas
don't flame me, as i am not proselytizing this idea, i am merely proposing it for consideration:
the "Microsoft Way" GUI is like the QWERTY Keyboard.
that is, it is certainly not the best keyboard, but it is what everyone learns to use, and expects to use, and so gets locked into the staus quo in a very unshakeable way.
the dvorak keyboard is obviously superior, but few use it, as few are exposed to it, and few are able to switch easily or with much readily available support and compatibility.
you could probably say much the same about alternative GUIs or alternatives to the GUI at all, for much the same reason.
i think we are all chained to a mouse and a keyboard and a taskbar and hierarchical folders for a long time to come, as this modality is pretty strongly entrenched into the computer using experience.
i like the time-based desktop idea, where everything is based on a timeline you can flip forward and backward to and from to the present... David Gelernter's idea... but what chance does it have against entrenched thinking? the human mind is inflexible once it is indoctrinated into a certain way of dealing with things, and there is also a social/ cultural inertia against change which is hard to shake. just ask us americans to use obviously superior metric units of measure, for example.
i am not saying this is a good thing, i am merely suggesting that this concept of acceptance inertia has to be taken into consideration when thinking about alternatives to the "Microsoft Way" GUI, unless you are comfortable talking about marginal applications only.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Jakob Nielson is involved in way too much. Good thing he likes to be pooped on!
Karma: Terrible (mostly affected by moderation done to your comments)
abstracting craft is a book which draws similarities between craft and the digital work many of us accomplish. haptic interfaces are the future, because they are the past--our past. i beleive it is more about separation of displays, as they are referred to in industrial/organizational psychology. here's a link to look at: http://www.eleganthack.com/archives/001896.html
I don't think the GUI is going anywhere. It may change ( become 3d or something ), but the computer in reality is just complicated dynamic paper, it still has to show you something.
The thing that needs to happen is things like audio interation. Speech recognition, and speech feedback.
I also feel that PDA/Desktop interaction will help. One thing that GUI can't do well is remind you of things, without annoying the crap out of you. For example, your typing and email, or coding, or whatever, and a reminder for a meeting, or a task, or something else comes up. You forget what your doing and you close down the meeting reminder and forget about it to. Sure would be nice to have a smaller lcd to the side that had that info on it.
A tactile interface is not graphical (you could have both, but in principle, they're different). It's not a GUI, and therefore, I don't think it will replace the GUI, it will supplement it. I don't see why there shouldn't be room enough in this town for both of them.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
"Eww, I felt the Goatse site!"
My point is made. I don't want a machine grabbing my berry basket and tweaking it like some kind of horrible UI gone wrong.
___ Shout Central - Crushes your nuts!
Oh great, now when I accidentally stumble onto a porn site at work, not only do I have to click "close window" 25 times, my co-workers are gonna think I'm having a seizure.
Dammit I thought this would be automobile porn...now that's where it's at.
___ Shout Central - Crushes your nuts!
A mention of "tactile" and "box" in the same sentence, and no-one has commented on this? ;)
There is only one thing to say, and that is that I think that tactile boxes are the way of the future.
Ooer.
uh, he has positive karma, dumbass
First of all, here are some of the arguments i'm familiar with for physical computing initiatives:
Here's a listing of the most historically famous initiatives, most of them starting in the early 90s or before. Many more exist.
Ubiquitous Computing was one initiative at PARC to put computational devices into everything from pens to badges to entire rooms. They mainly worked with office applications, like digital whiteborads, integrated desks. They also attacked the physcal interface from the perspective of human social contexts, that is, making comptuers part of social interactions. At EuroPARC, a somewhat unrrelated project to create paperless offices ended up creating a prototype desk called The Digital Desk that allowed a projected desktop and physical paper documents to work alongside each other on a white tabletop.
One of the first intentional physical interface projects i know of is the Tangible edia group at MIT, whcih is an extension of Hiroshi Ishii's great work called tangible bits. The main focus of this work was to make the concepts of a desktop physical, using "phicons" which always reminded me of monoply peices that you moved around on a table top. There was a gereat adaptation of this made for modeling the construction of light beams, where you moved physical representations of the different components and physically saw the different patterns of light.
It can be hard to actually describe the core concepts narratively, so some great conceptual designs often best convey the real concepts at play. The best has to be Durrell Bishop's Marble Answering Machine. It was an answering machine that represented each message as an encoded marble in a tray. To play a message you moved the marble into a small plate and the message would play, and putting the marble back would cause the message to be deleted, or you could save it someplace else. Here's a tangible bits paper that discusses this project (don't think there's an actual project page for this design).
For a good summary of all these in much better words than i can provide, try Paul Dourish's fabulous work Where the Action Is: The foundations of Embodied Interaction, in which he lays out his argument not just for new forms of embodied/physical interactions, but also some of the changes to core CS principles that are needed to support it. It's much more profound than The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman, though not as easily readable. chimchim
Forget about OS, build a OS based on python and maybe zope to create the latest Desktop experience. Store on the server, connect and use it anywhere.
I'm not sure everybody will agree with my opinion, but I think the primary quality factor of any GUI or other receptor of an interactive influence is the predictability of the result. I'm not sure any of our gestures can always have predictable results provided that we often don't really know what caused us to make exactly that kind of gesture (I assume you're a human, not a robot, and I assume you like beer and so on). Of course, I'm not talking about toys where any result can be interesting, funny etc.
As to my opinion, the future of the UI can be described as follows:
- The results of any operation should be predictable, even if you are not familiar with the object you're trying to control (well-designed GUIs already work this way).
- Every time, you are given the options that you consider to be most logical in this context. (Not many UIs do that, we tend to be happy even if our shell can do at least a primitive filename competion, or if there is expected item in the preferences dialog box.)
- UI should tell the user what can/should be done now, not a user should try to tell something the GUI.
- Okay, I could write a lot more, but it's time to sleep here in Siberia. The most important thing to say is that the existing technologies do not bring us the possibilities they really can bring us right now.
--With Best Wishes,
Constantin
Guess somebody saw Minority Report....
That sounds so much like .net
What? Me? Worry?
I think the better approach to looking at usability is not to focus on different types of media through which we can communicate with the computer, but to focus on levels of abstraction and simplification. For the moment, many tasks that we use computers for involved some pretty low level formatting. Half of the work of setting up a spreadsheet involves fiddling around with cell formatting, and a large chunk of my writing time is spent tweaking the output format or entering data into bibliographic databases so that the computer can format them. Going down to the nitty-gritty details at the lower level of abstraction should rarely be necessary.
I actually think that the command line is a good idea, but currently command lines are too low level, require understanding too much jargon, and commands typically do only single atomic actions. An ideal command would be along the lines of "Find all articles about discourse analysis and Usenet in peer reviewed journals in the last five years."
but i'm too afraid to tell anyone, because i know my idea will be stolen from me. and when they're done stealing my idea, they'll be busy perversifying commercializing and corporatizing what could have been a revolution. what a waste.
thankfully, i've got a couple other ideas that i can accept being stolen and broken. ideas that'll help me the learn the ropes of this vicious capitalist jungle.
i feel like lions (lawyers) meat.
I want a tactile feedback that comes in the shape of woman.
Hmmmmmmm...tactile feedback....gggghhaaa...*drools*
You want to use the best method of communication regardless of context or direction of information flow. Saying that a CLI or speaking is better for requesting information is simplistic. My classic example is file selection: for selecting files by pattern, a CLI will always be much quicker than any other method (short of telepathy I guess), while selecting a distinct set of files that don't conform to any naming or date pattern will always be much quicker visually and by pointing at them. In the real world, requirements are usually combinations of both, so the ideal solution would be a combination of both input methods.
Dvorak is not superior - here is one article that disputes the notion that Dvorak is superior
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
If you are using a browser that lets you select from multiple style sheets, choose the basic page style instead of the page's default "Useit House Style". (On Mozilla, it's View/Use Style/Basic Page Style.)
It's pretty much the same, but a bit easier on the eyes...
While we're at it can get get of the $#(*&@#$ qwerty keyboards. How annoying is that? If RSI truely exists it because my hands have to be yogic fliers to find all the keys located in the silliest of places.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
The reason why the mouse requires so much effort on Windows is that Microsoft (and by extension, most windows programmers) make UI's that take a lot of power away from the mouse.
The example most relevant to your post is the pull-down "File" menu. When they copied apple (or tried to), microsoft changed the location of the pull-down menu bar from the top of the screen (like on a mac) to the window of each respective application. With Apple's way, you can't possibly vertically overshoot the menu bar; with Microsoft's way, not only is it possible to overshoot the menubar horizontally, but you have to watch out for overshooting the menubar vertically as well. Putting it simply, a menu at the top of a screen has faster mouse access times than a menu on a window. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but it is a result of something called Fitts' Law, which states that the time to access a target is a function of the target's distance and it's size. For more information on Fitts' Law, check out this article on usability guru Bruce Tognizzini's website.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
The yellows are uncomfortable on the eyes. Some of the pages are a two column format. Not very usuable, actually.
If that's not proof that Microsoft is evil...I don't know what is!
---
I often wonder how much Nielsen really gets out and is aware of what actual users are doing, and what interfaces are in place and commonly used.
example:
"Gestural interfaces have largely vanished, except for obscure virtual reality research and a sprinkling of gestures in long-gone pen-based systems like the Apple Newton and the Go tablet."
Quick poll: how many of you use PDAs like a Palm, Handspring, iPaq, whatever...
How many of you were using them when the Newton first came out?
The 'gestural interface', as he's describing it, has became much more prevalent as the numbers of PDAs in actual people's hands has increased.
Also, the 'death of the GUI' is probably the most erroneous claim in this article. GUIs, as a means of interacting with and finding information are here to stay. It's the nature of these displays that we can see changing, from the traditional computer/television screen all the way up to fancy holographic interfaces like we saw in Minority Report, or even interfaces that are projected directly on our retinas.
The onset of tactile input devices is exciting, but it certainly doesn't herald the fall of traditional human interface guidelines.
Oh.. and Microsoft's Barney was nothing compared to an innovative talking bear from the 80s called Teddy Ruxpin.
But I guess it's all about who's paying your bills. :)
I love the smell of the Deja Vu girls
Hmmm... I wonder what a segfault would feel like?
Even proposing to take this guy and what he promotes for granted is so utterly bizare I can't help my self but laugh. Really, to me Cowboy Neal and Jacob Nielsen are on the same team.
... because lot's of people will use it so it's good ... because lots of... you get the point)
I mean, look at his site!
Honestly now, chosing MySQL over Firebird on performance principles or stating that Linux is easier for a newbie than Windows is one thing, and pass if you are a slashdotter.
But calling this guy with his sad and sorry excuse for a website the king of web usability is so gawdforesaken lame you wouldn't believe it.
I very much believe Jacob Nielsen and David Siegel (the other king of the web - the guy who 'invented' (ROTFL) spacer gifs) came to fame very much the same way. They started out early enough with gathering minions around them which provided links to each other and back to them - the so called 'other very good web experts'. Sewing a rumor that fed itself to full size. Just like the Windows 95 craze in times of OS/2 ('it's good
No folks, really, trust me, this is NOT your metier. Calling this guy a webdesigner with a clue is like calling Bill Gates a fair buisnesspartner and a supplier of good software. And makes anyone calling him that a greater clown than even this Nielsen guy himself.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I'm Maybe we already *have* a good UI.
Unices have the command line. That is an incredibly powerful utility if you know how to use it. Pipes and filters are excelent ways of representing data.
The GUIs we have, are good for manipulating visual data.
The problem with our current interfaces is not that they're too difficult to use. In fact, our technology is fine. We have a *moral* problem.
Our parents and grandparents have raised a generation of selfish, arrogant, lazy people with no patience at all.
People spend $3000( That's canadian dollars, eh) on a computer, and therefore expect it to work with absolutely ZERO effort on their part. They ignore any or all visual prompts or warnings. They will completely ignore any on-screen instructions that are presented to them.
I can only say that either these people are lazy, arrogant, spoiled snobs. Or they really are that stupid. How much reading comprehension does it take to understand the concept of "Any Key"?
Maybe we should leave the interface alone? It is possible that our money would best be spent, not on UI research, but on educating our children?
Just My 2.0E-2 Dollars.
What? Me? Worry?
"I want to look at big-boobed blondes in heat today!" Click. There it is. Maybe the PS3 can do this, since it's going to have a whole TFLOP of processing power to spend.
>If everyone has to watch you waving your arms >about all day long through a transparent screen >you'd better not be ugly. ...or over 5'5 tall.
"Microsoft's most innovative product of the 1990s was Interactive Barney"
Thanks, Jakob, for once again standing on a soapbox and proclaiming the incredibly obvious. We'll be sure to credit you for the next revolution. Dumbass.
The GUI is not dead, and it will never be dead. The fact that the man repeatedly makes such blanket statements is just a testament to his idiocy. GRAPHICAL user interface. The GUI arose because people hate using things that aren't nice to look at. Until it's all in our heads a'la some wacked telepathic version of Bluetooth, the GUI isn't going anywhere. Even then, we'll still need some sort of mental imagery. We're visual beings. That isn't going to change.
A concept the idiot king and all his little Jakobean subjects just don't seem to grasp is that style and beauty do not have to be sacrificed for "usability". That's just moronic. What if the major auto manufacturers only produced plain white boxes with wheels and no style or beauty whatsoever? They'd go out of business.
yeah right, i pick my nose, and boom ive deleted my porn
I learned QWERTY typing 17 years ago and have been using it ever since. Before that I used a QWERTY keyboard for 6 years and typed with two index fingers by looking or physical memory of common commands (catalog, run, other Apple DOS 3.3 stuff). I'm a tech/sysadmin that works on many PC's, not a developer who uses the same workstation all day.
For those of you using Dvorak, can you switch back and forth between Dvorak and QWERTY easily or do you get confused?
I've thought about trying Dvorak but have been afraid to because it would only be on my home PCs and laptop (and maybe 'my' workstation at work) and I might get confused like I do when I try to speak Spanish or French--I get them confused because I took two years of French in high school and two semesters of Spanish in college and hardly ever use either but mix them horribly when I try to use them.
Thanks.
Almost like the one in Star Trek Voyager, or the "intrusion friendly operating system". Seems like the system is optimized so that while you can't actually activate any defence mechanisms it's easy as one two three to enable self destruct or the "generally annoying plot elemtent of the week."
It is a bit too much exercise for the computer geeks... I don't think anyone can substain a debug session for an hour of that without sweating.
So much for my DDR-based UI...
- - - -
The real Tetsujin 28 is a giant robot.
After rading "Tactile" I knew where this was heading...
SCO (noun.)- A Slimy Corporate Ogre. Often seeks free money.
I haven't seen Minority Report, but I suspect that a successful gesture-based system would require only small hand/finger movements, and be "tunable" to disregard movements too small to be below a "noise threshold" (ie for folks with shaky hands). I've been using mouse gestures in Opera for a few months, and although they only control a few commonly used commands (forward, back, close/open window, etc) they've become almost second nature. And I only need move the mouse like 1/4 inch to use them. In general, I'd rather use something tactile, and therefore muscle memory friendly, than have to pick common commands off of a screen menu all the time.
Having said that, it's necessary in movie-land to exaggerate any man-machine interface for dramatic effect. So think of manic hand-waving as the gestural equivalent of those blinking, full-screen-width, slow moving progress bars you see in movies anytime somebody needs to download/copy a file before the Bad Guys catch them.
Click here if you just like to click on shit.
LCARS Is cool and "insanely Great" It is almost the perfect mixture of X-Windows (GUI), MS-DOS (Simple to use command line), and Voice(and video) technology. It also incorperates an AI command system and a true natural language programming language. It is the most functional and expandable Operating system ever concived, next to an AI controled computer (like HAL 9000).
In the case of metal machining a lot of feedback is in the form of sound and vision, which we certainly can do now - or tactile feedback in the form of resistance to motion (which is a bit harder to implement without mice squashing fingers). However, I find it hard to type without audible and tactile feedback (that interface in the final fantasy movie would be a pain to use without putting your hand all of the way through the controls).
I can just see the next version of a GUI - instead of annoying greyed out menu items you have a window in the way which you can't move no matter how hard you push!
I believe the future should be a mixture of old and new operating systems. A future operating system should have:
1) The power and security of Unix
2) The ease of use of PC-DOS (go big blue)
3) an easy to use GUI (like MacOS, Windows 3.1, or LCARS and a built-in text terminal)
4) An easy and (fairly)powerful programming language built into the command-line (like BASIC it AppleDOS or ProDOS)
5) a type of voice command AI and/or chatterbox capabilities
6) A built-in Office package (word-processing, spread-sheet and database)
7) built-in reference library (like M$-Bookshelf)
8) support for Voice technologies and Powerful Multimedia
9) Skin-able GUI
These elements would make a powerful and easy OS
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
What's all this BS about GUI (graphical or gestural)? I thought it was a foregone conclusion that a direct neural interface like matrix is/was/will be the easiest interface for the user. Of course it's a long long time away, but in the mean time I think the desktop is the best metaphor in the meantime. Or maybe I'm just smoking crack and should check myself into a clinic. Or is it because I'm already in the matrix and just don't know it.
so when sombody owns your box he/she can do some t1000 shit on you.
No? Then STFU.
I don't think that anyone has mentioned Sensable Technologies' (http://www.sensable.com) Phantom. And no, I'm not an investor. I used one of these six years ago and was blown away. It's a haptic (touch/feel) rendering device that consists of a jointed arm with motors at each joint, covering each degree of freedom, and a big amplifier to drive the motors. You program a physical model that drives the motors, so someone poking into your virtual world with the stick at the end of the jointed arm, will feel infinite resistance normal to the surface of a hard "object." But, if it's smooth and slippery, they'll get little resistance to motion along the surface, etc. It's difficult to describe appropriately -- it was one of the coolest technology demos that I've seen.
One demo was called, I think, Jell-O Blocks. Imagine a setup like a tiny hockey rink with a block of Jell-O on the ice. When you touch the Jell-O, you can feel the pointer squish into it and if you keep pressing, you can send the block sailing across the ice. If you sit there, you might feel a thud against your pointer as the block bounces off of the opposite wall and then smacks into your pointer.
These used to be quite expensive ($20K, I think), but I suspect that they've come down in price. Anyone use one recently?
While i realise that it wasn't a tacticle UI per se, I was inpressed with the computer interface in "Minority Report". The way he shuffled documents etc seemed very intuitive.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
While Aural communication is high-bandwidth, it is also much more complex. Especially in terms of speech, a complex set of instructions can be difficult to follow.
On the other hand, tactile feedback is one of the most intuitive and simple mechanisms for feedback. If you feel resistence if you try to move in one direction, you immediately stop, and think twice before continuing. (Am I going to break something? Or more generally, it is an effective replacement for "Are you sure?"). This can be a great improvement to usability with only a marginal increase in requirements, because of the low bandwidth. (A lot easier then voice-recognition!) And with the combination of this with other feedback, the possibilites are multiplied.
I agree with your closing point though. The trick isn't to use all the tricks we can, but to find some sort of balance that 'feels' right.
Reminds of that story about replacing the dollar notes with notes that are actually easy to distinguish, not impossible to use for visually impaired people and easy for foreigners.
"Oh man those foreigners are so dumb! Why would you need gay, coloured notes? Green notes and cool, and they look like *money*! Besides, they have a fucking big number in the 4 corners! Since when did arabic numbers become hard to read?"
*sigh*
That's the future of interfaces. Holograms that pretend they are tactile objects, but are dynamic and appropriately fitted for the task at hand. For example, manipulating a laser to target in 3D space gives you a sphere-like interface with rotating cuffs. Watching Aki Ross work on Gray in one of the earlier scenes really made sense. Adaptive buttons and switches based on the task will also be possible.
The best we can do is retry the classics (buttons, switches, levers, etc). These sorts of interfaces will just make the old way much more adaptable for a million tasks.
Why bother.
oh great, when there is a Blue Screen Of Death or compiler error, it'll jab me with a spike, electricute me, and punch me in the mouth with a branding iron. i'll stick with the GUI and CLI thank you very much :-)
PC-based Tactile User Interface: PTUI, the new way to communicate with your computer.