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."
Is there a HID with a the robocop spike on the horizon?
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
So he's predicting that things will pretty much stay the same, with just the usual slow progress.
Pretty wild ideas there, I hope he doesn't try to patent the keyboard and mouse or something.....
-Space for rent
It is estimated that this will not change by the year 2012.
Random is the New Order.
Through 2012, more than 95 percent (by volume in gigabytes) of human-to-computer information input will remain keyboard- and mouse-based (0.6 probability).
I guess robot love dolls won't be on the market until 2013. (99.4 probability)
by volume in Gigabytes
And what about in MB or KB?
The same??
Ok, that was just to use a buzzword, I understand better now!
...when you pry my qwerty keyboard from my cold, dead, carpal-tunneled hands.
Check out the University of Chicago's Computing Cluster & Cybercafe"> and MIT's Media Lab for more information about human user interfaces. This article is behind the times, in regards to stuff that's already been produced in the laboratories.
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 thereIt has the crappiest usability and the highest per-byte costs of any form of communication since Morse code telegraphy, but it's wildly popular. Amazing.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
I think 94 percent will be mouse generated (e.g., the new "Hello, WordProcessor" document would have several KB of different font styles, markup, colors, and all that jazz (all mouse based), and only a couple of dozen bytes of text (via keyboard).
S
A technology prediction that predicts that the radical changes in human interaction previously predicted won't happen overnight. Non-senationalist predictions of the future? Wow. Irony would be if there was suddenly a major breakthrough in speech recognition and he's wrong.
How 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."
Firstly, there is a certain tactile "feel" to writing on actual paper that would be very difficult to replicate - and if it feels too different, I suspect people won't adopt it.
Secondly, cost - could this be brought down to a price that would be economically feasible? If it's not as cheap as paper, it isn't gonna happen.
That's not to say that I wouldn't like to see it introduced; we could all have our workplace documents on those little pads, similar to theones in Star Trek, and I'm all for anything that will stop the slaughter of forests - I'm just highly pessmisitic. The author seems to be of a "more of the same" persuasion as well. Maybe someday, but I don't think we'll see it in the next ten years.
Illegitimi non Carborundum.
Consider plans for alot of gaming consoles (Sony is interested in Hive technology, for instance) to become integrated with your household. I can see your entire home being hardwired into a single pc, and you can just go room to room, turn on any tv/monitor, and play whatever games you own, watch any tv shows or movies, or surf the web. Can't see all this still operating with even advanced Mouse and Keyboard technology.
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
Let's break it down:
.. but will these new interfaces work with my flying car?
Trolling is a art,
By 2008, retinal imaging and augmented reality will become available in mobile devices (0.6 probability).
i've been on the mobile subway devices of NYC and D.C., and let me tell you... the reality there is extremely augmented. normally, i've found peak augmentation to occur around 4:20 in the afternoon for some reason.
I didn't see anything mentioning the bugeoning ubiquity of people reverting to the CLI. Somehow I'm not surprised.
'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?
More of one than you think.. I don't think he's talking about your monitor. In almost all consumer electronic devices, know what the most expensive component usually is? Yup, it's the display. Reduce the price of that, and all of a sudden, those consumer devices have a lot more to work with. More screens, better screens, enhanced power, cheaper price, etc... if we can reduce the cost of the display significantly, it can only mean good things for consumer electronics.
slashdot!=valid HTML
'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!
Alright. I predict that by 2013, Slashdotters will still be making "In Soviet Russia..." jokes.
Illegitimi non Carborundum.
more than 95 percent (by volume in gigabytes) of human-to-computer information input will remain keyboard- and mouse-based
Is this even true today? I doubt it's true of my own work. I own a digital camera. I don't take many pictures; I'm not very photogenic. I figure I take about 50 pictures a month... let's call that one a day, to be conservative. 1600x1200x8, uncompressed (I use a raw format that sends 8-bit intensity data for each pixel, as each pixel in a digital camera is only one color), comes out to very close to 2MB per image. In a given day, I also spend about 8 hours sitting in front of my computer. I type at ~60 words per minute (never said I was fast), coming out to about 160kB/day. Now, I don't use my mouse too much, since it hurts my wrist. But even if it sends 4-byte updates 300 times a second when I'm not moving it at all, that comes out to 35MB a day... hardly a realistic number, but let's run with it. So my total keyboard/mouse input is 36MB a day, at an absurd maximum (I do stop for breath occasionally), while my non-keyboard/mouse input is 2MB/day, at a rather absurd minimum. And just with those numbers, I have (slightly) less than 95% of input being keyboard/mouse based.
I know a lot of people who take more pictures than me. One person taking 10 pictures a day is enough to offset 9 people who take none. A few people use speech recognition... that's relative high-bandwidth input. And I'm sure at least one person in ten thousand has a digital video camera...
So, does anyone think this 95% number is true even today?
--
I've had this sig for three days.
~Niels Bohr
Unfortunately, I can't vouchsafe the quote. John Perry Barlow circulated it a few years back and when I asked him where he found it, he couldn't remember. So perhaps if Bohr didn't say it, he should have.
The world came to an end January 1 2001, but we were all too drunk too notice.
Not everyone deserves a 320i
As an esteemed predictionaire of sorts, with full
backing of the predictionationization society, here
are my predictions for the next decade:
#1 Algebra won't be hard someday
#2 Grass will mow itself
#3 The Aliens people have encountered will be
revealed to be the "geek" or "dork" aliens. The
Jock aliens stay back on marklar and get laid and
drink. They are much bigger and stronger.
#4 Trendy computer users will start doing
"case piercing" and the truly EXTREME will try
out hard drive piercings. They will be made of
steel at first, but aluminum will become the rage.
#5 Wireless wires will be invented to replace the
wired wires.
#6 The "tornado in a can" will become "the can"
in your bathroom. Flushing dead goldfish will
never be boring again.
#7 Top ten lists will transmogrifimorphicate into
top 7 lists.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
For other things, however, you need an OS that will stay up no matter how much you f*ck with it. :)
that means the male dolls will run Unix
I really couldn't care less about those modes of input. Can you imagine everyone in the office talking to their computers at once? And it wouldn't really help that much for programming or data entry, the tasks that a lot of computers get used for. As for handwriting, my hand starts to hurt after about five minutes of writing stuff on paper, and i usually give up and open up Notepad. And that's not even considering that my handwriting sucks and would be about ten times as difficult to process as "normal" handwriting.
What this guy really isn't saying much about is direct optical feeds; ie, beaming visual information onto your retina, or inserting false visual signals higher upsteam in your nervous system, and direct mental input; either in the form of reading the synapses in your brain, or recording your motions as you type and guesture in the air.
That's the kind of technology that will cause a major shift in the way we use computers, and is so different from our current modes of interaction that you can't really extrapolate from here to there. I'm sure scientists during the 40s and 50s were predicting great advances in vacuum tubes (the science fiction authors certainly were at least) that never materialized, or at least that were never utilized, because of the development of the microchip.
I have no idea if those kinds of technologies will be fully developed in the next ten years or not, but i don't think this guy has any better of an idea than the rest of us.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
By 2012 computer displays as we now know them (LCD, CRT) will have been relegated to inexpensive embedded systems. Bleeding edge office information devices will function by tracking the user's movements and speech, as well as manipulation of common objects in her work environment. They will serve the same purpose as graphical icons do today. The computer screen will have been subsumed into dynamic surface markings and other detectable changes in the objects in her environment. They will have reflective (as opposed to backlit) display surfaces where information can be encoded in textual, graphical, color, or texture attributes, and sometimes some degree of 3D physical configuration changes. These will range from writing surfaces that resemble paper, cards, packaging materials, and other document-like entities, to instrument or appliance control panels and communications devices. User interactions with these items can produce changes in both the displays and the underlying data repositories. Moving them, rearranging their relative locations, adjusting them, speaking into them, and other as yet unforeseeable user interactions will effect the state changes that embody the user's day to day tasks. Think of a cube with an environment of intelligent interactive devices that visibly and audibly change as work gets done. The devices themselves will also be communicating and interacting as needed.
I love it!
All prophets should use probabilities. That way, nobody can ever prove you wrong.
Say "The world will end on 1/11/2003 with probability 0.6" Suppose it doesn't end, so what? Someone's going to come back and say "Ha! It didn't end! The probability couldn't have ever been higher than 0.3!"
Suppose you say "Buy Acme Widget stock. It will go up 120% in the next 6 weeks, probability 0.8" People buy it. It goes up 120% in the next 6 weeks. They get rich. Are they going to come back and say, "Well, yeah, SURE, it did that, but you said the probability was 0.8 and it was really only 0.7"
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
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.
Over the last several years, keyboard have taken many evolutionary steps. We've got ergo-keyboards, enhanced-keyboards, laser-projected-keyboards, etc.
We may very well still be using keyboard 10 years from now, but they'd probably differ at least a bit from the ones we use now.
We're not going to get rid of the old QWERTY (or for some odd few, the DVORAK) until perhaps we can plug into ourselves, or until that one-handed keyboard comes around.
Personally... I'd like to plug myself in, but viruses would really suck then.
I think they're a bit late with that one. For a while now I've been spending every day sitting in front of a computer display...
Oh, wait...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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.
Not really. Let's see, the guy's version would run win32, so it'd always stop working just when you need it. The girl's version would run linux, and stay up as long as they wanted...
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
- Legacy data, apps, source code
- The trend for english to become the "standard" language world-wide
- Inertia
Keeping the post on-topic: the article said, basically, that things aren't going to change much. Which is really a non-news item. ASCII will be around, we'll be typing on qwerty keyboards, and clicking with mice.Gartner's words sound like PHB (Pointy Haired Boss) fodder to me.
Here's a real predition: Integration of devices will result in the replacment of single-use items such as PC's, TV's, cell phones, PDA's with portable and fixed units that have multiple functions. Consumers will buy "multi-media consoles" capable of several functions, that are more flexible and cheaper than indivdual components. Wireless networking will be the standard communication method between devices given the cost of adding wiring to a house, and the flexibility of putting your console anywhere. As a result, the lines between media types will blur, as 'television' as we think of it now will cease to exist with the advent of services that allow you to watch programming at a press of a button rather than on a schedule. You will read, listen to music, and shop, all from the same console. Integration will make the price of a large console about the same as a current mid-range PC, so consumers will buy several units in a family setting. Portable units will allow you to take your shows/music/information with you, and allow you to still use all the features your big console has while within network service range.
Barriers to adoption of such integrated devices will come mostly from the companies that control the current media types as they will be concerned about losing their current revenue streams. The companies that successfully come up with new payment schemes that are both profitable to the company and palatable to the consumer will end up breaking the barriers until eventually getting to the point where you can subscribe to any service from your integrated console.
W9x:Thanks for the make-work project Bill.
The lame "push tech" of the internet past was, and still is, a complete failure because no one wants to view a constant stream of ads over their limited bandwidth. Pull is much more efficient for sipping content over a straw.
:) I think that shows that the ultimate goal is PULL, even on a TV.
You're forgetting, however, that the distribution of video over cable (with immense analog bandwidth) to a TV would qualify as "push" as well. TV is so immensely popular that the average american watches it almost as much as he sleeps! If you throw a TiVo or other set-top box, you've got push-content through a computer. The odd thing about this is that TiVo is designed to make a strictly push technology more pull like
Push's place is where technology isn't good enough to allow for pulls. This is the reason push of video content via analog or digital means will outpace pull for some time. After that time, I'll start watching TV again.
no, because if the male love dolls don't work, they'll still need us for something
Ubiquitous.
Ubiquitous to the point that your very idea of "consumer electronic devices" is obsolete.
The existence of light emiting and electrically conductive liquid polymers that air cure is going to be completely transformative. Both display and electronic circuits are going to be printable on anything you can feed through your inkjet printer.
Think about that for a minute. *ANYTHING* you can get to feed through a printer ( or anything you can adapt a printer to print on) can be both a display and electronic circuit to provide driver and logic functions.
Think of all the things that are printed right now. Now think of all of them having "embeded" display and logic functions.
Like your paper placemat at the diner. And yes, they are even working on being able to provide *power*, self contained, in that paper placemat.
Your computer monitor will be pretty cool too. It could be nothing more than a sheet of 1/8" Lexan with the pixels printed on it. In fact, that same sheet of 1/8" Lexan could be your entire PDA or tablet PC if your data storage requirements aren't too great. Or on a sheet of polyethylene film you can fold up and put in your pocket.
All that will be pretty cool.
But it's the paper placemat thing that will be transformative. *Anything* can be a simple logic and display device. *Anything* can be a consumer electronic device.
Like Junkmail. Ready to get your free AOL *device*?
KFG
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.
that means the male dolls will run Unix
Yes, but I'm guessing people purchasing male dolls will not be running Eunuchs.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
That's not push in any commonly-used sense of the word. If that's push, then Google is a push service.
And "push" has already been tried in that sense, and people don't like it.
There was a thread here a few days ago about how PVRs were "anticipating people's choices", based on their previous viewing habits. The general consensus was that people don't like having their habits monitored, and other crap pushed on them.
Just like people don't like spyware, linkware, etc.
What most users want is freedom of choice, and to be secure. Their "intelligent" anticipation of what you watch/read/see/hear is too bib-brotherish.
The future of computer interfaces
provided by Gartner
Human computer interfaces will not get worse during the next decade. In fact, they will get better. This is really important, so listen up.
Development will be slow, so not much will happen at first, but later on something will come out and you'll be like "whoa!" Something cool might happen really soon with displays because I read in PC magazine something about Tablet PCs, which seem kinda new. And we saw an article in Popular Science about new OLED screens which seem pretty good, so we'll probably see those for sale some time far in the future. But you can already buy the Tablet PCs, so those will probably catch on sooner, we think.
Analysis
More and more people use computers, so we think that probably this will continue for a while. Because computers need displays, we feel that as we get more computers, we'll probably get more displays too. That means they'll become ubiquitous, like McDonalds.
Products will also not get worse, but better! That means they will be cheaper, easier to use and more powerful. This may come as a suprise, but it's true! In particular, we're pretty sure computers will advance on the following fronts:
Prediction
More computers! More screens! Crazy research like OLED and Speech Recognition may or may not be big time in 2020, but for now they are a niche.
Also, we noticed that most people still use CRTs, but more and more people use LCDs 'cause they're better. Probably this will be true when the OLEDs come out too, 'cause they're even better.
All that crap about digital ink and flexible paper? And those little eye screens like the borg have? Those will probably happen sometime by 2012, when no one will remember this article and we'll be off the hook.
Prediction
Remember that thing about advanced interface metaphors we talked about? Well we thought of some:
Thus endeth the suggestions and analysis of Gartner group. Printed versions of this document with pretty charts for power point presentations are available for $299.
The voice recognition software we have today, will never catch on in the workplace, unless everyone is given their own private office. Cubicles won't cut it.
/. if you are at work "working"?
How are you supposed to dictate a message to
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Input interfaces will enable computers to sense their environment and the identity of their users, and personalize interactions appropriately.
PC: Dave, I feel so cold. Did you let the windows open?
Dave: Ohhh... poor boy... here, I will get a blanket for you.
PC: Dave, no... do like you did last time, overclock my AMD...
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
Unicode is backwards-compatible with ASCII, so the legacy/source code argument is irrelevant. There are already compilers available (such as Vector Pascal) that interpret Greek, Cyrillic, Katakana and Hiragana. Heck, by 2012 I want to be able to code in Klingon!
I hate Grammar Nazi's
Make that: Klingon!
Wow....
I hate Grammar Nazi's
Umm... MP3's? Video Recorders? Cameras? -C
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
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
Through 2012, more than 95 percent (by volume in gigabytes) of human-to-computer information input will remain keyboard- and mouse-based. (0.6 probability)
60% probability? Are you nuts? How about 100%? I can consistently and constantly type at 100 words per minute, but I certainly wouldn't want to talk that fast. I doubt I could, and even if so, it would hurt my throat after a while.
Writing pads are nice, but again, I can -- and most other people -- can type alot faster than they can write.
Other forms of inputting data into computers will remain niche at best. Voice recognition will be used to quickly convert professor's lectures into documents, and hand-writing recognition will be used to convert hand-written notes into documents.
However, no one will be writing 10-page papers by hand or speaking them. Could you imagine it?
"While I was, umm, 6x backslash, going to the park and um, 8x backslash, I saw a..."
In short, its not going to happen. Outside of planned presentations, people speak in a manner which is specifically for dialogue and which does not make much sense on paper, except in a dialogue.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
By 2012, the proliferation of LCD screens and the introduction of alternatives, such as LEP technology, OLEDs, electronic ink, and many other novel approaches, will almost completely end CRT-based screen production (0.6 probability).
I find it interesting that he predicts the death of CRT screens so far away. I see that as happening right now.
Fail.
Of course, touchscreens by that time will be supplied with accurate handwriting recognition algorithms, which already exist, but still not that accurate and not so popular (touchscreens will help to popularize handwriting recognition).
Personally I'd like to have touchscreen at my home computers, but not for that price. Besides, I work in Linux and I did not find any working implementation of handwriting recognition for Linux. Any help with links?
Less is more !
Back in the '80s I wrote a program that changed the tokens for a BASIC compiler into french after the compiler was loaded into memory. You could code in french, and the compiler didn't know the difference. Bonus - when saved, the program reverted to english. So, what happend? The french chose to continue programming in english instead! :-)
From reading your post, it came to me that a good addition to scroll bars might be the ability to assign a constant "scrooling speed" that you could start off, and read as it went along, and pause or resume when you liked.
I know from watching computer logs and other text scroll past on a screen that you can make sense of a LOT of information scrolling past very quickly.
It would be interesting to see how annoying it would be to have a browser start scrolling automatically as soon as a page was loaded, or if it would be of use...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
While I expect the direct use of the CLI to remain constant, with Linux and OS X on the rise I expect GUI/CLI hybrid applications to continue to grow. Combine the power of the CLI with the flexibility of the GUI and you get the best of both worlds. I would expect many, many OS X users to be using CLI tools without even realizing it. Have a look at VersionTracker and you'll see more and more recent OS X shareware releases have been like this.
When Barlow first sent the quote out, I googled and altavista'd the quote and came up empty-handed. I really wanted to use it as a sig. Now the quote is everywhere and yet nowhere. The best citation I've found is in a paper on variablity analysis. The author found attributions to Bohr via Barlow, Yogi Berra and Mark Twain. The author cites some suspect reference counts. I say suspect because when I attempted googling Mark Twain sans Bohr, I came up with much smaller counts. In fact, I even found a site that attributes the quote to a Chinese proverb.
What's even more interesting is that the quote morphs not only in who said it but what they said. For example, searching for "prediction is difficult" and "prediction is very difficult" pops different result sets.
Even odder thing about the quote is its impact varies with attribution. Tack on Niels Bohr as the source and it acquires an appeal accorded to quantum mechanics and those who suss it. Change the source to Yogi Berra and the quote feels very much as something he would have said. A sort of "man in the street" feel. Put Mark Twain on the quote and it's classic American humor. Make it a Chinese proverb and it feels ancient.
It's a great quote but I do wonder who said it first.
Gartner, as usual, has no clue. 95% of input via keyboard? No way! Even today, I would guess that most human-to-computer input is done via camera and microphone, when you look just at the number of bytes. How many gigabytes can the average programmer input per year? And how many gigabytes can a webcam generate in a year?
This is especially true now that Hollywood is starting to switch over to digital filmmaking.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
What if I want to swap a symbolic link with the primary inode? What if I want to inherit many custom-defined attributes? What if I want a multiple inheritance - several equal parent folders, not just a parent with second-class s-links?
I agree with the prediction about taxonomies and knowledge maps.
Less is more !
well thanks for putting a damper on my weekend ;D
I hate Grammar Nazi's
The Klingon alphabet was disapproved [unicode.org] for inclusion in Unicode in may 2001.
[voice="Shanter"]
Why? Damn them! Why, Spock, whyyyy?
[/voice]
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up. --Rex Stout It is utterly implausible that a mathematical formula should make the future known to us, and those who think it can would once have believed in witchcraft. --Betrand de Jouvenel, The Art of Conjectur Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital. --Aaron Levenstein So, these probabilities that this guy is giving are complete bullshit. He is using statistics that he made up.
Is there any place (or places) anywhere on the web that can answer the following questions:
:})||
1. Is there study that can give us a sense of what percentage of computer programming/development/engineering is being done where? That would help answer a question like are there more web programmers than, say, telecomm. developers, or say, military avionics developers.
2. Expand or modify the above question to show what the #s are for languages, environments, IDES, and OSes, from a developer's point of view.
Just curious. There is so much propaganda that it is really hard to see the real picture. thanks,
"Someday, the words "Christian", "Moslem", "Jewish", "Hindu", and "Buddhist" will be used the same way that today's Christians use the word "pagan."
Actually, the dolls will be running Windows. After all, what good is a sex doll that won't go down on you. Over, and over, and over... :-)
I predict that 99% of predictions will be made by other organizations than Gartner by 2013. (0.7 probability.) Gartner's worth will have been reduced to 0.01% (by volume in $1000's of USD) because no one will be interested in their stupid attempts at reading the tea (maybe pot) leaves.
well-weighted, machined edge, free-spinning, finger-friendly, LED illuminated, multi-purpose jogwheels.
... I want something I can give a spin, have it keep going for a while, and have it stop (within reason) only when I drop my fingers again to arrest the spin.
:)
...
The Griffin powermate is a cool-looking device (I just ordered one, have not yet had a chance to play with it), and I hope will meet that description pretty well -- I am curious (and pessimistic, but willing to wait) about its free-spinny-ness
I'd prefer a spinning jog wheel to a mouse wheel for the same things that mouse wheels are used for right now.
More importantly, I'd like a jogwheel for both playing and editing sound and video. In Mplayer, for instance, rather than the arrow keys + space bar (though those are fine), I'd rather be able to tap a jogwheel for pause / play, roll it forward for fast motion, roll it backwards for backwards fast motion, etc.
I'd like the GIMP to be jog-wheel improved, too, so any operations which have a slider could be activated by the jogwheel instead.
Multiple reconfigurable jogwheels would make video editing more fun, too -- say, one for standard audio track volume, one for added voice over or music track, one for moving around in the video stream itself. (For which a real video mixing board would be nice too, but less useful for other things).
Another example of using several jogwheels might be this (and I'm thinking of the way the powermate works, as I understand it -- there's the wheel itself of course, and a single "button" which is to say that the whole assembly acts like a mouse button when pressed down):
In Mozilla, have a triplet set up for
1) scroll up / down current page; button might
2) sroll sideways through all open tabs
3) open and scroll down the bookmarks file
Idea: For all these things, a small and bright LCD display on the base of the wheel would be cool, so it's easy to keep track of its current function.
Also, playing breakout-style games with a mouse is just lame" Think jogwheel = atari paddle
Are there any truly suprelative jogwheels I should know about? A few old video games had good ones, but I don't remember their names
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Here in Denmark the quote is usually attributed to Robert Storm Petersen.
On the other hand this page (in danish) says that it originated in a danish parliamentary debate of the period 1935-39. This is according to the memoirs of the politician K.K. Steincke. He doesn't remember who said it though. (Basic political instinct, I suppose.) It has also been attributed to Markus M. Ronner (whoever that is)
Niels Bohr was apparently the first dane to bring the expression abroad, and hence he has recieved credit.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
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
So where are the Star Trek terminals? What's the instruction cycle length on those suckers? How come they don't have to reboot their computers every 10us? Damn TV technology: 99% bullshit, 1% interesting concepts.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
I seem to remember reading predictions in PC Mag in 1995, that by 2005 we'd still have the mouse and keyboard, but would be mostly communicate by voice speaking in a natural voice, the computers would be smart, with "smart agents" doing a lot of the work for us, that we would all login with fingerprints or retinal scans... we're no where on our way to being there by 2005, computers are a lot faster, but finger print and retinal scans don't seem to be that popular, and "smart agents" turned out to be not so smart.. anyways, at least this article gets the "mostly by keyboard and mouse" part right.
I'd have to say that the current human-computer data interaction leaders "in volume by gigabytes" are video and audio based and I don't see that changing. This is because no matter how much I type and click over the week it can't touch a single 12 meg photo transferred from my camera.
It's just a stupid benchmark, is what i'm saying. If I invent a program which fills my hard drive with the letter Q when I hum softly, it wins over keyboard input.
Better might be an analysis by some scale which took into account the focus of the tool. If I spoke this to Dragon rather than typing, it would have taken me half the time for the same number of bytes. Which would let me have more time to surf porn with the left handed mouse. The dictator was much more useful than the mouse, but the latter is "doing more work."
Hey freaks: now you're ju
"hearing the text of his or her e-mail read aloud while riding in a car"
This is just what I need, as if road rage isn't already a problem...
[sys] enlarge you penis now! this new medicine will..
[me] DELETE!
[sys] lose 100 lbs in 5 days!
[me] DELETE!!!
[sys] hot and sexy webcam sluts want your..
[me] DELETE!
[sys] mr. obertoneryan wants you to help him get his money out of africa...
[me] OH FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!
Of course it is popular... per-byte cost doesn't figure into this; no consumer will give a crap about an outrageous per-byte cost. What the consumer buys with his money is convenience.
Think of it: SMS offers a few key advantages:
- Send and receive anywhere: What other form of simple technology allows messaging from almost anywhere? (And in this case: simple means just that, my great-grandmother should be able to use it. She can use SMS and cellphones, she cannot use a laptop and 802.11 and read war chalk or whatever)
- A low to zero initial cost to use this service. Most people already have cell phones, SMS comes as an extra service that you can use straight away without any extra charges (besides the cost of the messages themselves)
- Can be used unobtrusively: Very few other forms of messaging can be used without disturbing others, including voice calls on cell phones or usig a laptop with wireless data. Think about it: what other form of communication would you use comfortably in a theatre or classroom?
- Low cost. Oh yes, the cost of an SMS is often less than a phone call, especially fwhen you want to convey simple message's like "Honey I'll be home by 6"
When you think of it, the popularity of SMS messages despite the crappy interface, isn't all that surprising.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
The third page of the article mentions several new areas of human-computer interaction that are likely to become very important drivers of business success for software companies in the coming decade, such as taxonomies, knowledge maps, and active alerts based on pulling information related to user preferences.
Right now there is no standard for any of these areas. There are no expectations on the marketplace for the look & feel. There is nothing to copy from the world of Unix or from the Mac or from Parc or from Windows. This new field is totally wide open.
Will the free software community step up and demonstrate creative leadership in humane, truly empowering, open approaches to these new UI opportunities? Or, since it's not a chance to either bash Microsoft or promote Linux, will the free software world sigh, yawn, scratch its collective butt and then complain ten years later that corporations are controlling the world's access to these crucial software technologies?
If I had any mod points, I'd give'em to you.
Companies not caring about the usability of their products is a problem that will not be solved no matter how many new technological advances are thrown at it. While open source/free software allows people who give a damn to make changes, the people who are currently doing open source/free software are just as apathetic towards usability as most companies.
It's not a tech problem; it's a people problem, and those are always a lot harder to solve.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
I was quite disappointed by this article -- I don't know if ZDNet is providing the whole thing, but overall it was very short. It also missed one of the main development areas that I think is important, which is a whole lot more ubiquitous computing.
The article doesn't really predict anything except the continuation of the same old stuff that's already happening. "Computer screens will become more convenient." This is hardly a big surprise. Neither is the amazing prediction that speech synthesis will be used more as it gets better. These things are boring -- they're essentially saying that what we already have will get better. Well duh!
On the other hand, there aren't any interesting predictions because they're all already obvious. What about clothes that sense how dirty they are and indicate to a washing device how [much] to wash them? For that matter, what about clothes that adapt to downloaded designs and properties so a user doesn't have to buy new ones to look different? What about intelligent feedback audio systems that aren't speech related? What about intelligently using vibrations and other kinetic methods to indicate information so people's eyes aren't distracted?
These are just off the top of my head, and they're the sorts of things that everyone can't come up with easily. For one thing, they actually require some genuine investigation and research to predict, if they can be predicted at all. A few decades ago, a computer was a building sized juggernaut -- almost nobody predicted that they would be on desktops and in everyday devices. That would have been an interesting prediction.
Various technologies are evolving that will significantly improve interaction between humans and computers
I'm more interested in improving human-human interaction. That "unused social capital" bit really peaked my interest.
I see it as sort of a counter-balance for the big city life.
One of the many things I don't get is why everyone wants to ditch CRT in favour of LCD.
Sure, the footprint is smaller (I guess my 19" CRT would look a bit odd attached to a laptop by a hinge). But, in terms of viewing experience, no LCD screen I have used gets close to a halfway decent CRT. The pixels are too discrete, the viewing angle is too narrow and they aren't as bright.
Admittedly the ones I have seen are mainly entry level (ie only twice as expensive as my CRT) so maybe the ones that cost more than my house are better.
Does anyone out there like looking at LCD displays, as opposed to the trendy box they come in?
Virtually serving coffee