Slashdot Mirror
Human-Computer Interfaces From 2003 to 2012
Roland Piquepaille writes "My favorite forecaster, Gartner, is back with a new series of predictions about the way we'll interact with our computing devices. Here is the introduction. 'Human-computer interfaces will rapidly improve during the next decade. The wide availability of cheaper display technologies will be one of the most transformational events in the IT industry.' Not exactly a scoop, isn't? But wait, here is a real prediction. 'Computer screens will become ubiquitous in the everyday environment.' Ready for another prediction? 'Through 2012, more than 95 percent (by volume in gigabytes) of human-to-computer information input will remain keyboard- and mouse-based.' Check this column for a summary."
Some of the problems with push technology
- Piggy-back of spam, unwanted data, etc
- Security in general
- Cunsumers have already made it clear they don't want it
- Wasted bandwidth
- Wasted time filtering out the unwanted stuff in the feed
The rest of the story was also pretty ho-hum. Nothing to see thereHow about having a computer for a secretary? DARPA is funding a "enduring personalized cognitive assistant." The system will be able to "reason, use represented knowledge, learn from experience, accumulate knowledge, explain itself, accept direction, be aware of its own behavior and capabilities as well as respond in a robust manner to surprises."
'Through 2012, more than 95 percent (by volume in gigabytes) of human-to-computer information input will remain keyboard- and mouse-based.'
By volume in gigabytes? Call me a contrarian, but I'll bet videocameras will exceed keyboard input by that standard. Wanna test that notion, Gartner? Point your text editor at a file, and I'll fire up my webcam recorder. Ready? GO!
When I bought a Canon EOS-1 Camera and it could focus on different areas inside the viewing area, depending on where my eyes were trained.
The question is...how long before this technology makes its way into mainstream computers, or something like it.
Wouldn't it be nice to just look at the monitor, blink twice and have the folder open. Careful where you look though!
Take the mouse, for example. According to this article, the mouse was invented in 1968. And it didn't become popular until the Mac came out in 1984. That's 16 years of obscurity before general adoption. Granted, there wasn't really any general widespread use of computer technology in that 16 years, so these days it'd be a good bit less. Still, people are really slow to switch away from something familiar that "works".
After watching Minority Report, I liked the idea of using gestures to interface with your computer. However having to wave your hands around like that would get tiresome real quick. The most time consuming part of getting things done on a computer(aside from the software) is having to go back and forth between the mouse and keyboard. Even with keyboard shortcuts, it is unavoidable. I started thinking of other ways to use the same type of gesture interface but with your hands only. No keyboard, no mouse. Muscle movement memory is very efficient. It only takes a few repetative movements to get used to a static environment. Have you ever stuffed envelopes? You get pretty efficient in no time. The reason a keyboard and mouse is not like this(mostly the mouse) is because its position is always different. Your hand has to find it. A keyboard is much better because once you get used to the layout, your hands pretty much stay in the same place. So how does a gesture-based interface fit into this? What I envisioned was using only your fingers to do the gestures. To change tools, like from cursor movement to keyboard you could use finger movements or a combination of two fingers moving in a direction as a switch, or even lifting your hand higher. This interface would not require you to touch anything. Your hands could be anywhere and in any position. The hardware would monitor your finger and hand movements. You could be standing and resting your hands on your legs while doing it. Imagine your hands are resting on a hard surface and you are typing, there would have to be a tactile feedback like the little dots on f and j on most keyboards that tell you where you are at. Maybe a range of motion field gets established in relation to your hand positions at that time. Also the hardware would have to provide this tactile feedback like sleeves on your fingertips or gloves. Once the area is set it would be easy to get a feeling where the keys were. Tactile feedback to determine a key-click would be important. When you need to switch to a pointer, you make a gesture with your fingers or hand(s) and fingers. Or you determine a position above the set keyboard space that is the pointer. Like moving your index finger up 2 inches above the keyboard field and using it as a pointer. I know it wouldn't be as simple as that. It is just a starting point. I also can imagine if it were done correctly you could basically haul ass moving through windows, multi-tasking etc. The current issues are we have a set area for our keyboard and mouse. We leave that area, we lose our interface. People move around, we use laptops, we like to keep our interface setup consistent when we switch computers. The mouse is never exactly where we expect it to be and is too far away from the keyboard. The position of a keyboard and mouse on a table in front of us is not always the most ergonomic or comfortorable positions. Gesture interfaces are better because gestures are easier to remember. They can eliminate having a single area for an interface. They are more configurable. You can keep their configuration consistent for any computer you use. It is more comfortorable being able to put your hands anywhere and still be able to work. You could possibly customize the tactile feedback to suit your taste. Gestures can signify complicated tasks to be performed in an application.
Display technology has vastly improved. I'm now just waiting for the price to come down on IBM's T221 LCD so I can have one on my desktop. We purchased one at my workplace and it just blew me away. It is the first display I have ever seen that can be reasonably compared to quality laser printing on paper for its rendering of sharp, crisp, readable text. 9.2 million pixels in the thing and NOT ONE OF THEM IS DEAD. Yep, none, nada, zilch.
As far as interaction goes though, I doubt we're going to see much improvement. Programmers do a terrible job of UI design and a lot of companies are just too cheap or ignorant to hire professional user interface designers or else provide in-depth training for whoever is doing the UI design regarding usability issues. Most companies are also too cheap to do real usability testing. They might test out the new UI on the guy three cubicles away, but he's hardly representative of your customers. Until that changes, human-computer interaction is not going to improve.
Cheaper display technologies will surely shake up how we interact with our information, but I think that everyone is missing something very important.
Prognosticators have been chasing this dream of a paperless office for decades now, with very little realization. Indeed, some researchers have indicated that we like paper because it lends itself to spatial organization of information -- you're likely to remember where you left a paper document even long after you've last used it.
With cheap displays, we can make small, portable displays -- sort of like Microsoft's failed eBooks, but you get to view whatever information you want, whether from your own library or on the net.
And get this -- these would be cheap enough that you could have a small collection and sit down at your desk and leverage your brain's built-in spatial organization strengths. And when you don't need that information anymore, just call something else up.
Many people use multiple monitors. This would be like multiple monitors that you can stack, reorganize or just toss into your outbox.
I don't know if the designers of Star Trek:TNG had this sort of thing in mind, but in that series and every one since then, you'll see characters sitting at a desk surrounded by a mess of these little things.
Interface design, speech and handwriting recognition, sure. But just being able to move data around in real space is going to be very comfortable for us.
This is a little article I wrote a while ago called "Can We Improve Computer-to-Human Bandwidth?" which I haven't done anything with...so I might as well post it here:
--------------- begin article --------------
I bet I can guess something about you: right now you are reading something on your computer screen. The text is displayed on a display set near eye level, probably in black text on a white background, or white text on a black background. You read all the text that is visible on your screen, then you press a key or click a mouse button to scroll down to see more text.
Was I right?
Since the early days of computing, fifty years ago, that is the way data has been transmitted from computers to people. The improvements have been quite modest, involving sharper displays, more readable fonts, better choice of foreground and background colors, and so on.
In the same time period, there have been many attempts to improve how data flows the other way, from people to computers. Different keyboards layouts have been designed. Voice recognition may be just around the corner. The mouse has changed how data is input, possibly not speeding it up for power users, but enabling a whole new class of users to communicate with a computer at all.
Data flow in the other direction has remained the same, an exact simulation of reading text on a printed page. Yet computers are much more powerful than a printed page. Is it time to take advantage of this? How could this be done?
Certainly the real limit on how fast people can read is how fast they can process the underlying information. But some part of a reader's brain is occupied with deciphering the text on the screen. For some dense texts that percentage will be trivial, but for many others it won't be, so the question becomes how much of that can be removed, getting people closer to their theoretical limit.
One change that already exists is to have computers read the text out loud. Unfortunately, while most people can speak much faster than they can type (or write), it is doubtful that most people can listen faster than they can read. One reason is that spoken language, with its elided sounds and lack of spelling, is less informationally dense than written language. Thus it is faster for a person to speak than to spell, but slower for he or she to listen than to read. While computer reading is a boon for people with certain disabilities, it does not speed up how fast data flows from computer to person.
A more radical idea would be to reconsider why the text stays still and the user's eyes move. Why not scroll the text so the eyes can stay still? Of course the computer would have to adjust the scroll rate for different users. Since your hands aren't doing much of anything when you are reading, so I could imagine reading text that was scrolling by with one hand on the mouse, with the left button slowing down the scroll rate and the right button speeding it up.
What about changing how the text itself is displayed? It's risky to get too far away from this because everyone has a lifetime of training in reading printed text in books. Still you can speculate. What if different parts of speech were color-coded on the fly, or displayed in different fronts, or in a slightly different location on the line? What if the computer compressed certain words as they appeared (such as compressing George W Bush to GWB - the reverse of a trick that writers use: typing frequently-used phrases in shorthand, then going back and replace them later, or letting Word's auto-correct feature do it for them). This may be disconcerting at first, but it may turn out that with practice, this can improve the transmission speed for people who need to quickly digest a lot of information coming at them from their computer.
Moving beyond text, consider the fact that a sign language translator can keep up with spoken language, and is also limited in speed by the need to move hands and arms around. One of the advantages of sign language is that location within space can be used to convey information; for example a room can be laid out visually and then movement within that room conveyed by changing where the signs are shown. Could computers use a similar trick on the screen to speed up how fast information is displayed? It could be a lot of work to learn how to interpret this, just as learning sign language is a lot of work, but the payoff could be worth it.
The main thing is to get out of the mindset that static text on a screen is necessarily the best way to present information. Once that assumption is shattered, interesting ideas should follow.
---------------- end article ---------------
- adam
Some of the most exciting new interfaces come from music.
New interfaces in Musical Expression will be in Montreal this year.
Check it out at http://www.nime.org
Rob