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."
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)
...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.
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."
Let's break it down:
'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!
~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.
I think it's just you. Demonstrable E-Ink displays already exist, how long do you think it will take to refine them?
And, why do we have exactly duplicate the feel of paper? E-Ink is supposed to duplicate the flexibility and static display capabilities of paper, while adding digital versatility. The feel of writing on paper is learned, not instinctive.
Finally, why does it have to be as cheap as paper? It's much better than paper, it has many more uses, but it makes no sense to feed E-Ink into a laser printer or to hang it next your toilet. Digital ink keeps you from having to buy paper all the time.
...
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.
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.
I was never comfortable using the word petabyte. Just imagine some day if you have a 1,000 terrabyte file. Will it be a petafile?
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
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.
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.
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.
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
"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!
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.