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What Will The Future Desktop Interface Look Like?
b O b 1 9 19 A writes "The TechZone has an interesting article wondering where computer interfaces are going. They discuss some alternatives to the traditional desktop, and propose a framework in which future interface designs may be evaluated. From the article: 'The next 10 years will be a transitional phase for interface design. 3D rendering technologies already have a stable home in the entertainment, video game, simulation, and design sectors. Although 2D interfaces have dominated everything else, I expect we will start seeing more 3D incursions. Operating systems and applications are beginning to capitalize on what 3D has to offer. The precise nature of how and where 3D can best be incorporated is an open question, and a framework to evaluate these questions seems appropriate.'" Big-time ad alert. Set your ad and flashblockers to stun.
holy shit w00t
device that lets you move onscreen objects by just thinking about it. We can do a brain-controled 2-d cursor easily now, better stuff will be on the way soon.
There will be no desktop in the future. It'll all be integrated into our cyberbrains (Ghost in the Shell-like).
Muhahaha. I plan to get a jump on the competition by patenting the 4D interface. It's like a 3D interface, but better ;). I'll show Eolas how it's done (by spanking MS for even more money).
But in all seriousness, I am working on the 4D metaphor. I have a prototype I've been working on up on my website, just haven't had the time to finish it.
Cheers
I am John Hurt.
All I want is to fly around a 3D filesystem that looks like downtown NY and search out the precious garbage files like in Hackers. Oh and Angelina Jolie can bring her sweet laptop with 28.8 bps modem too.
What, are they running their server out of their basement?
If I have five common tasks on my desktop I do, how will rendering them in 3D make it easier? More eye candy and less artificial intelligence, just like in the game industry!
It's a UNIX system! I know this!
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
Current interfaces aren't 2D, they are 2.5D. There is a z-axis, it's just less immediately obvious than the x and y axes. Ever put one window on top of another? Yep, that's depth.
The reason why 3D interfaces aren't really that useful is that you really need a 3D input device to make use of it. But the trouble is, the way our bodies are built, it's very tiring to wave our hands around all day long. At least with a 2.5D interface, our hands are resting on something.
The other problem is that the value 3D provides over 2.5D is very small. What does it actually get us? We can already put things behind and in front of each other. We can already zoom in and out of structures. We can't rotate well - but that's not something that I think stops useful things from happening.
What we need aren't 3D interfaces, what we need are smarter interfaces. Not necessarily natural language processing, but simple stuff that works and is practical. Tab completion in UNIX shells is a good example. Intellisense in IDEs is another. Clippy is rumoured to have actually been useful in the lab, before it was hobbled for desktop computers. Spotlight is making things easier to find.
These are the kinds of interface enhancements that will be of most use, and they can come along piece-by-piece without anybody noticing, without needing new hardware, and without users being forced into a new paradigm.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
This looks cool.
There are many, many interface ideas out there; anyone who's attended a SIGCHI or similar conference can attest to just how many, how varied - and how weird - they can be.
However, it's getting pretty clear that the WIMP stuff we have really is pretty good. We hit upon something which while far from perfect still is reasonable. Other interface ideas need to be substantially better, and without serious flaws, and that is difficult to achieve.
Having a 3D component is a good example. There is little doubt that it will be used in _some_ form at some point in the future. It is also clear that getting it really right is not easy; so many projects have tried and failed already. When what we have is already pretty good, the bar is very high for mistakes, drawbacks and problems.
To connect back with some earlier desktop discussions recently, this is exactly why having a multitude of desktops is a good idea - not just two, but ten or more projects, all trying various ideas and directions. Chances are one of them at least will stumble upon a new, better way of doing something; a new, better way that the others then are free to copy and improve on. That is also why it is so important to have more than one toolkit - ultimately you are constrained to what the toolkit allows you to do, and thus you need more than one to take into different directions.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
The only thing that has changed sence windows 95 is the colors and cute icons.
By then the average desktop will be powerful enough to handle this smoothly. 3D Desktop. http://desk3d.sourceforge.net/
Just as was mentioned, 3D interfaces do not add a TON of detail because when it all comes down to it... we can only truely view things on a 2D level. I have experimented with some 3d desktop betas that are floating around the web, and I have not really found anything that gave me any advantage over the traditional interface. Adding screens, and using multiple destktops seems to make the most sens. The true future of desktop interfaces must focus on how we can interact with them. Thought control would be optimal, but even some gloves one could wear to control things could dramatically increase productivity. Screens in glasses (which are even cool now) have some great potential too. These have the advantage of privacy, and allow a much bigger display when everything is put in perspective. Ultimately the best display would be some sort of direct stream to the brain, just bypassing the eyes. Till we get to the point where we patch windows to our brains... (OH NO... BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH AGAIN!)... or now that I think if it... once we patch an OS other than windows to our brain we will only then be able to make the jump to an effective 3d environment, because then we dont have to worry about seeing the extra dimensions... we just comprehend them.
Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the annunciation of truth.
Page 1 through 5 .. A d . l i n k ] .com ]
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PS. My eyes have stopped hurting now.
At least with a 2.5D interface, our hands are resting on something.
An e-book! but FULL size. With REAL e-pages. With true point-and-click interface (stylus) instead of a mouse. Want to switch app? Change pages. With non-volatile memories, you can change the page from your full action game, to your homework.
You could use the tabs to have "virtual books", so one tab is the desktop, another is the PDF file you were reading, and so on.
Close the book, and you'll turn off the PC.
Of course, the book will be JUST a peripheral (even wireless), the real monitor can be 3D or whatever you like.
Thinking about it, a book is the *perfect* interface for a computer. Right now PDA's are bulky, hard, with delicate pages, not very practical to handle. But in the future, with e-paper, books will "just work".
(Whoa... that was deep. )
3D interface? Check.
People claim they're intuitive. OK. Check.
Customizable? Check.
Probably no carpal tunnel problems, although maybe some strained necks.
Good enough.
maybe we should replace the steering wheels and pedals of cars with trackballs.
I've seen far too many of these articles about how much better 3D interfaces are going to be, and no actual explanation of how it will make my work easier. Which is not surprising, because it won't. It's a solution in search of a problem.
A desktop system with easy-to-program (read: the average consumer can do it) widgets and interfaces. Probably with some nice web services integration. People who just need to read email and surf the web only need a couple widgets, maybe a mail checker or something. People who work in offices and do really repetitive tasks have ways of easing that through the widgets (again, very easy to program/setup widgets!).
I think anything that allows people to really use their computer the way they want would be great. I'm not saying it doesn't already exist, but I mean something where nearly everyone becomes accustomed to using a computer as a configurable tool. Something where all those times people say, "Well, I just want it to do [this]!!", they can easily set it up to do whatever it is.
Just my thoughts.
Everything I need to know about copyrights I learned from Slashdot.
Office of the Future!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Dont get me wrong computers are wonderful and i love using them (i still even live in my mothers basement) but i remember the day when it was insulting for any self respected nerd to rely on mouse functionality and a vesa based gui...
Now its considered cool and okay, well its not! computers should be difficult, they should take hours of your time figuring out complex comand lines (awk & sed for instance) to achieve simple day-to-day tasks. We should all stop posting on fancy vbulletin forums, using gaim, and skype and go back to using BitchX or epic3 irc clients, and we should use pine for our email and write our documents in pico. As for web browsing there is nothing wrong with lynx.
I guess the only good thing about GUIs is the ability to look at porn and thats where fvwm95 comes in and this should only be accessed behind closed doors.
EOR
seems like you could use a gradual curved mouse pad, shaped like a ski jump, that would give you the 3-D part of the interface once you left "flat and level" and moved up the slope. Your hand would still be resting on something firm, but you'd have a new interface level.
Or make the mouse have a curved back so it could easily tip-up and rest on a rounded back surface, with a slightly raised front, again, initiating the 3-D movement required
now how to do those things I'll leave to the EE guys
Tight gits, the only pictures I saw were ads?..
/.
1. cover page in 60% ads, post to
2. ??
3. Profit!!
Big-time ad alert. Set your ad and flashblockers to stun.
/.!
Ah, yes, large obnoxious and bandwidth heavy graffical ads...the bane of sites being posted on
Let the bandwidth hogging and server melting commense!
Read the rest of this rant...
Not KILL
I remember reading about "where interfaces will be in 5 or 10 years..." I also remember playing with those Apple demos of desktop and browser technologies from '96-'97.
Where are we now with Windows and Mac OS? Just refinements of what works or doesn't work from 10 years ago. In 2015 we'll be having the same articles and little will have changed.
I dont think its likely that 3-D will do anything but make the experience worse. It would take some very smart design to make it useful.
Bottom line is that essentially what 3-D does is add more visual information for your brain to have to process - even if you aren't thinking about it. Adding all of that stuff your brain has to process even if you think you're ignore it could only be good if the interface is some amazingly smart idea we've never seen before.
Desktops? I haven't even SEEN my windows XP desktop in months. I start programs from the start menu, and I look through my gazillions of files with File Explorer, modified with several add-ons and extensions to make it function smarter.
Graphics are better than command-line interface, but beyond that adding more rarely helps.
This space available.
It is sad that anyone has the vision of people still sitting in front of displays ten years from now. My prescription, switch to glasses with very high resolution across the full field of view but the ability to be transparent too, give the computer multiple cameras placed strategically around the room so that it has a full 3D view, integrate head position detection and a point of view camera into the glasses also, and then create an interface where the computer places virtual objects in your environment in a natural fashion. i.e. Let's read virtual books on our real desk, see the images of people we're talking too remotely as if they are sitting in a chair in our office, have virtual office decorations, have a virtual whiteboard that we can stand in front of and interact with (just a blank space on the wall that the glasses allow us to see as a whiteboard for a while), etc. i.e. augmented reality should be our 10 year vision.
http://www.3drealms.com/duke4/
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I am surprised nobody mentioned it: The future's interface is LCars. Simplicity, elegance and functionality. Plus it's in Star Trek's computers :)
If you draw a bunch of dots on a piece of paper you will not be able to draw lines joining the dots in all possible configurations unless the lines cross (given some sufficiently large number of dots. I think 5 might do it). However, once you hit three dimensions, all configurations are possible without crossings. Adding a fourth or fifth doesn't have any further beneficial effect.
The same is true of planes in three dimensione, or cubes (or maybe whatever you'd call an infinite version) in four dimensions. More to the point, so what? Is there some utility to drawing lines that don't cross?
What is the deal with eye candy. I think programmers have gotten lazy. It is alot easier to make things zoom in an out in 3d with glass effects, but much harder to come up with unique ways to make interacting with a computer more natural. What we need are smarter applications and interfaces. I want to see multi sensor fusion being incorporated into computers. Imagine a itunes picking a song based on your mood. Computer vision could track facial features and posture. A microphone could monitor your voice and IR sensors could be used to measure body heat. All this data could be incorporated to decide which mood your in and thus pick the best song for the moment.
How about the computer detecting your level of frustration and learning what you really want instead of having the user go through the same steps each time.
How about changing your desktop based on your mood.
How about tracking retina motion and moving the cursor. This would be great for advertising too
How about redeveloping the keyboard in such a way that there is less keys and have the computer guess what your going to write.
How about computers learning what type of slashdot stories I like to read.
This is where software should be going. Why haven't we gotten there yet?
Its probably going to look like a crapy letterhead design like the rest of the internet.
Haven't you guys seen the Matrix? They were operating Zion control room through a virtual world and it was still only a 2D touch screen.
Just look at the Macintosh interface from 4 years ago.
-eric
Very usable, does nothing, Everyone understands it. Developers consider themselves visionary looking at 0 bugs filed.
I introduce first to you the humble progress bar. A good progress bar does two things. It shows how far along something is (percentage complete) and it show that activity is taking place and your computer has not just frozen again.
So in days past when screen were primitive you simply had a row of dots appearing with maybe if your lucky the occasional 5% added to give something like ......5%........10%....
Add the capabilty for backspace and you usually got a little spinning character made up out of -\|/ to show action taking place. Some more advancement and you got a full bar like 0****5****10****15..| (work with me here this is hard to do in text)
But then GRAPHICS were added. YEAH. So now you could draw a bar slowly being filled (but for some reason loosing the activity indicator). Color was added and now you could make the bar turn from red to green.
2.5d add shadow effect to make the bar appear round. 3d and it can stand up like a real seperate bar on your screen.
And what is the freaking point? Well none. All of them did their work and clearly showed what was happening. Okay they became better looking but it gave no real advantage.
So are there other tasks that can benefit from better graphics? I think you have the following main type of jobs on a pc.
Yes I would like a 3d interface when I am manipulating or inspecting the relations between objects on my pc. But is this a common activity? Well I look up at the tabs of my opera browser. Current desktops already have a sort of 2.5d and perhaps my tabs would be clearer if tabs of new pages where "behind" the tabs they originated from. I arrived at this input screen by opening a new tab from the story page (helps me remember where I was when I am finished here) but this tab is at the end of the tabs not indicating that it has a relation with a tab almost at the beginning.
Still with me? Another example. My music collection has a lot of soundtracks. Trying to organize it completly is a nightmare. Especially if I also want to organize it by genre (so I can easily switch depending on mood). Luckily I am on linux so I can use symlinks so an album can be both in
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
1) Less steps - no further explanation
2) give both hands something to do
3) the interface must underatnd that its puprous is to inturpret your intentions - not your actions
4) the interface must be programable - interface creates new functions from your actions
5) people need to forget about speech or 3d as the be-all-end-all answer
6) LACARS!!!! Interface changes to match application, while maintaining basic concepts
7) smarter context menus with better keyboard navigation, for ALL objects - NO EXECPTIONS
8) combine Drag and Drop with context menus - this would tie objects with actions
9) limit transparency - see how apple has backed off on it - because it sucks
10) 100% thought controlled
one word, one movie... "Swordfish". And while you're playing Duke Nukem Forever on this OS, a terribly bland Paul Oakenfold mix will be blasting your drums at full volume.
If you think
Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of computers in this country. Mac OS X^3 was the system to own. Then the other guy came out with a three-dimensional interface. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called Mac OS X^3.1. That's three dimensions and an aloe strip. For moisture. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened--the bastards went to four dimensions. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling three dimensions and a strip. Moisture or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to five dimensions.
Having average people "program" is really the way to go. Everyone has a different opinion on how their desktop or application should look/behave. Let them have it there way. To have this idea work there really needs to be a standard in the way in which data is stored (possibily in xml). If data is presented in a standard way a real programmer could make a generic function for one piece of software which the user could then import into another application and have similar features. Code reusability and generality is key. Imagine writing one spell checker that could then be incoporated into another piece of software without any code rewrite but by simply dragging the feature from one application to another. Normal people could create their ideal multimedia player, web browser, etc.
a 3d desktop and a trackball mounted on a mouse in the place of the scroll wheel. Rotate targets with the ball, move with the mouse, click with the buttons. Maneuver in three dimensions through your desktop icons. Dodge flying "Click here to install AOL" icons. Fight with XOrg. Curse ATI. Keep an airsickness bag nearby for motion sickness.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
What does a half dimension look like?
Yeah, I understand what it means in this context, and I don't fault the parent poster for using it. . . but, at some level it just doesn't make sense. Not sure what a better description would be, though. Perhaps "tiered 2D" or something of the sort?
Ultimately, the usual windowed computer screen allows the user to make use of a third dimension in almost exactly the same way that a desk with books and papers on it does. The user stacks things up in piles separated in the principle plane, and then brings whichever bit they want to work on to the center of that plane. Occasionally, they'll leave something else open and visible off to the sides of the main work area.
So long as you're using your computer to do the analog of what we do with desks, anything else is either eye-candy or will hinder getting things done.
That's not to say there aren't places in which 3D interfaces could really be interesting. Just they what most people spend most of their time doing on computers can't be made any easier by arranging things in 3D. At best, they'll end up using it in exactly the same way they do now. At worst, they'll have to go through a bunch of extra steps every time they rearrange things.
Preview screenshots of Vista beta are circulating here:1 3.html
http://www.unitedti.org/lofiversion/index.php/t41
You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!
Back in the early days of the computers.... "blah blah blah, this will make work so easy, people will be able to spend most of their free time doing whatever they wish since computers will do everything!!" Look to now "We bought these computers, so we are going to use them as much as possible. Could you please put in another 10 hours per week for now on?"...... Perhaps it's just lack of sleep talking, but if 3D interfaces (and i/o options) mature, why do I see it just giving an excuse to work even harder?
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
People don't work like that though. Do you think the LASIK industry is predicated on people liking wearing glasses? They do a good job of hiding my broken nose.
You know what I'd really like? The same interface I have now, on a 30" LCD that costs $1000. Hell, make that three of them. I'm using three 17" LCDs right now and two notebook computers next to me. What does joe sixpack want bad? a 60" plasma TV.
That I suspect is what the future will bring.
You want my predictions for 10 years?
Great big, high resolution displays, and probably several of them.
A wireless keyboard sitting in front of that display.
A wireless mouse sitting right next to it.
Next to that monster display will be a pad of engineering paper, and a pencil.
A big plasma TV on the wall, perhaps displaying video conferencing.
No guarantees on where the computer is - probably nowhere to be seen.
Perhaps a PDA or remote storage device capable of wireless networking.
That's the future. What's on the screen will probably look very much like what is there now.
..don't panic
The most obvious example I can think of is writing. Using syllabaries or ideograms is clearly not as good a technology as using an alphabet. The learning curve is vastly worse, the total number of symbols that must be memorized is orders of magnitude higher, etc., etc.
And yet a pretty high percentage of people in the world today read and write in languages that do not use alphabetic writing. Japanese or Cantonese readers/writers are not going to switch to an alphabet anytime soon, despite its many advantages, because of the sheer cultural and historical weight behind their current approach.
I don't know if we're at that point with computer interfaces yet, but the longer we go the harder it is going to be to get people away from GUIs using WIMP. Even non-PC tools now use this metaphor for UI - for example, your cell phone probably has some basic WIMP approach. If some 'innovative' new 3D tool just makes this prettier, well, that will be nice, but it won't really change anything much. If it really changes things, it may not succeed even if it's a clearly better technology, because so many people are getting locked into our current approach.
I can't help but notice that this kind of inertia is what keeps IT shops from migrating to Linux. It's clearly a vastly superior tool in every way to Windows. Ten years ago the switch might have been easier, if Linux had been readier. But now, IT is much more tightly coupled into corporate infrastructures, and there is a lot more inertia to be overcome for such a dramatic change. (Even if the change is for the better.)
One thing that technology geeks like us forget is that, for almost everyone else, the technology is just a tool, not an end in itself. It has to fit into the overall picture. Changing something (office suite, operating system, interface approach, whatever) is really tough for most people, even if the end result is that the change is for the better. Us geeks think that change (buzzword: 'innovation') is automatically good, but for most people it is automatically bad. The change has provide something so vastly better in their opinion that they will put up with change.
4D - I mean it, 5 years I give it.
... with CLI as we use it now?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
What is this going to do with the command line? The command line has so far tested the test of time...
I'm shocked nobody modded you up. I mean, c'mon, people! And my mod points expired but 6 or so hours back. Ah well....
Rob
It's just a bunch of round spheres!
I think a navigable distributed 3d desktop would be very interesting. The desktop would be 3 dimensional, but with pieces of it distributed across numbers of computers and accessable, contingent on permissions, from any connected computer.
Think of a hallway with various doors along the way. Behind each door would be a person's desktop. Navigate down the hallways to a person's "office", enter the door, if permitted, and enter a public version of his desktop. Through an internal door would be the private version.
A company could organize the location of the halls and common areas by department and could include rooms available to the general public as well as rooms available only to authorized users. The rooms might count as virtual meeting rooms, as rooms containing links to allow you to directly jump to related locations, or something else we can't even imagine.
Of course, it wouldn't matter what computer you logged onto. You could go to your virtual desktop office to your public desktop and, from there, enter your private door to get to your own desktop.
Imagine the merging of the desktop interface, the web, and a virtual world like secondlife or something similar.
Your living in it now. :)
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
However, it is highly inefficient to modify data in a purely serial manner. Serial went out with punch tape. You are always going to have to slice data in some form or other, because data will typically have far more dimensions to it than can be entered or displayed.
The problem is, most slicing mechanisms work on instantaneous snapshots. They are "horizontal" slices, if you like, across a moment in time. But flow-based programs don't just have an instantaneous state and therefore don't have any reason to be limited to just receiving data as if that was all the program could handle. Flow-based programs are built around the system/model as a whole, over all possible paths and eventualities. Feeding data into them a single time-slice or event-slice at a time is no more efficient than writing a program to plot a sine wave by manually entering fixed values at fixed points.
Let us take this one step further. Not only have people broken away from the instantaneous state, they have broken away from sequential ordering. Programmers, for the past twenty to twenty-five years have been much more interested in multi-threaded, multi-data, anticipatory, event-driven programs and computer architectures.
The only "sane" way to handle the I/O for such software is by allowing time to be an element in the display. And this is fine. Humans are great at recognizing patterns - it is what our brains are optimized for. And there are no patterns in a single slice, because by taking a single slice, there is nothing to relate to and therefore no patterns to observe.
The only interest manufacturers and developers have had in 3D displays, though, is allowing people to display a more "complete" or sophisticated slice. They're still completely missing the point that interactive computing isn't batch processing on tranquilizers. If you're going to have interactive computing, make use of having a human at the console. Give the human patterns! Allow them to manipulate those patterns directly. In other words, allow them to directly manipulate the change of the data, not just the value of the data.
If you're going to have "complete" slices via a 3D display, then ergo, you must need a 4D display to manipulate the way the data changes, particularly if you want to be able to see how the flows split and recombine, as a single slice cannot capture information about the path(s) you are NOT on. Furthermore, to go back to the sine example, slices are only good for discrete events, they're not useful for continuous systems. However, 99.9% of reality is continuous. (Which is why computer models are generally crap. Discrete approximations of continuous systems are almost never going to be any good.)
High-performance computing has reached the limits of sliced-and-diced discrete-event I/O formats. If HPC is to progress much further in human-computer interfaces, they will have to display change as something more than just frames in an animation. It isn't realistic to the user, isn't logical to the program and isn't producing useful results anyway. Since it is generally the HPC labs that have the Really Big Money, this is where you will see any new display technology.
LCD monitors that can use polarized light to display full-color 3D images - hey, that's cool. The systems at SC|05 were most impressive for what they were. But they're not system images, they're still snapshots. People want to manipulate systems and to do that they will need to "see" systems and interact directly with them. And 3D just isn't enough. You need 4D for that, whatever 4D might actually mean in a p
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
just realized the girl in jurassic park predicted the future by saying those lines...she was looking at a Mac I believe and said that line....I could be wrong though....speilberg knew... I think I'm going to help that idiot with the $3.8 million 4D shit....I'll integrate a Nintendo Power Glove as the VR new age mouse. And the screen can do some of that futuristic crazy shit like in that true to life film "Hackers". If I can just find my big red book.
Beer! It's what's for breakfast!
That's my away msg whenever I'm on my mac laptop :-P
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
Little hand-held unit, pops up windows and a virtual keyboard as they're needed in free space. I can't wait to see if the heliodisplay can be shrunk down into a small enough package to bring that off. I think those things will be the wave of the near future if they can miniturize them enough.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
How about a panoramic desktop? Maybe spherical... instead of the paged desktops you get with linux where you have a grid of desktops or some such, make it as if the screen is a view of the inside of a sphere. Wouldn't that be fun??? You could pan around and place icons wherever... then zoom in on them to edit. Allow for unlimited granularity... and add big labels to sections of files you'd like to group, or draw keylines around them in some color... maybe be able to select a group of files and context menu 'group' them into either a label or a folder.. then add a sticky note about that group.
Each folder/directory could be another sphere that you'd jump into... with it's own background color, big giant watermark folder name and sticky notes to tell you what's inside... maybe you could preset a widget or two for that folder... say you've created one for doing accounting, you'd add a calculator, spreadsheet and banking widget... or you've created one for doing word processing... it's got that, plus a dictionary, thesaurus and a web browser with some preset bookmarks to research sites you've found to be useful for this project. etc. etc.
Let the task define the space.
Start with something simple and let it get complex according to the needs of the task you've assigned.
This type of UI would use 3D in the sense that you could pan between widgets and documents and generally organize how you'd like to interact rather than trying to cram it all into an arbitrary fixed dimensional space...
Like for instance, I'd love to shrink this browser window to about 75% without changing it's aspect ratio.. I could still type but I could also have room for my email, calendar and a few widgets while retaining the abillity to zoom in on it if I decided I wanted to focus on it more.
anyways, just some thoughts on the subject...
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
The future interface will be a huge unblinking eye with a one button control. Pressing the button will poke the eye or something.
I like to think that with advances in technology comes the push to make things smaller and less intrusive. As computer hardware becomes smaller and smaller, it will become unnecessary for the case/tower to be visible or accessible at all. I think the trend will be to move technology out of sight and let it help people do what they want to do without the hassle of configurations, passwords, errors, and the day-to-day computer maintenance that we suffer through today. With that in mind, I picture some sort of hands-free interaction, probably with voice recognition, some kind of 2D screen, and possibly some form of motion recognition for pointing with your hand.
I think displays should be miniaturized and made to fit into an eyeglass and get video signals wirelesly from a pc that is as small as a credit card which fits into my wallet.
Minority report.
-- Cheers!
So the future mouse will work like the controllers for the Nintendo Revolution? A more 3D-like HID for a 3D UI?
I make enough of a mess on my 2D desktop... 3D just adds a whole new dimension of mess for me. *sigh*
I suppose the important thing is flexability. Some people really like to have one huge desktop nine times the size of their screen and pan around. Some people like to have twelve desktops represented in a linear fashion. Perhaps a speedy 3D representation and selection mechanism is out there or waithing to be found.
When you consider controls used to operate equipment away from computers most of them are very limited in the number of dimensions that actually apply to the control - for instance a valve wheel has one dimension of movement - it rotates clockwise or anticlockwise and position can be represented by a single value. However, the rate of change of that one dimensional value can be more easily changed on a wheel than with arrow keys on a keyboard.
Funny to see an article contemplating interface design in various dimensions published on a web site with such an attrocious interface. I got to page 3 before I had to close my browser window so my eyeballs weren't fried out of their skull by ad-overload. Just think, someday it will be 3D ad-overload!
is here. It's called Google Earth. No reason you couldn't link additional places/content inside a building, be it real or virtual.
Have a look at the screenshots, and download it if you like the look of it. It is free in speech and as in beer.
http://www.symphonyos.com/
"Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too."
Is it possible to design UI similar to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_teller_mach ine UI?
Slashdot = Sarcasm
>>> What Will The Future Desktop Interface Look Like?
a pair of boobies.
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
Everyone already knows the defacto future desktop will be Windows Vista, like it or not.
You're right. It will be Windows Vista. Windows has 90%+ of the market now, and Vista will be released in about ten years. Therefore Windows Vista will be the operating system of the future!
3D? Okay, visualize trying to find a real piece of paper in a box in a 20,000 SQFT warehourse. Now, if you want to wander around a virtual 3D space doing the same thing like a rat in a maze looking for the cheese, feel free.
So, to my mind, 3D organizational spaces are the wrong direction. Spotlight and Google Desktop are the first steps in the right direction. Why should I have to organize my work and documents into trees of folders and project hierarchies? Why add keywords when the computer should understand context? Shouldn't the computer be able to do that kind of scut work?
Picture the perfect assistant. "Donna, find that claims letter I sent to Bob last week... no... no... yeah that one. Scroll down... down... okay. It's approved. Attach the current spreadsheet and forward it to Dave. Oh, and let me know if he has any changes."
Now, picture "Donna" as your automated, computerized, super-assistant, with whom you can communicate by voice from anywhere, anytime.
Live with a program like Spotlight for a while, and you start to find yourself bypassing the Finder and Desktop and folders altogether. What's needed is a better way to communicate (voice), and a system smart enough to know who Bob is, who Dave is, what a claims letter is, understands "last week" as a variable period, and can put it all together.
Yeah, it's the Star Trek interface.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Here's a different approach. If anyone hasn't yet seen it, I'd suggest trying it out. I never made any use of it (the conclusion from everyone who's tried it and loved it), but it was one of the few programs I've ever tried that seemed to make any headache from staring at a computer screen too long just go away.
That said, I doubt anything will come of any new approaches for years to come. We still have offices, and in those offices we'll work at desks to generate paper which we'll put into labelled folders, which in turn will get stored in file cabinets.
Those desks, files, folders and file cabinets aren't going anywhere, and neither are the metaphors, least of all for the reason that irrespective of whatever new metaphor one creates and implements, someone still has to manage and administer it all. So, short of some revolutionary breakthrough in artificial intelligence and a corresponding increase in processing power, files and folders it stays, leaving some body responsible for doing the requisite work. Google afficonados, of course, keen on their next web application will be free to continue to pretend otherwise, and not bother concerning themselves with such things.
I guess this brings us back to the venerable command-line. In the future, I don't doubt that Microsoft will implement for their users some sort of speech recognition facility so that instead of clicking and pointing, users can grunt or shout at their icons, but the rest of us? We'll be doing productive work at a prompt by pressing keys on a keyboard.
But ALLLLL I hear about, 100% of the time now, is what kind of interface it has. Does it crash? Does it compromise your privacy? Does it in fact do *anything*, useful or not useful, AT ALL??? Who cares; it's got a *lovely* interface. You people keep buying cars based on the color of the paint job and whether the turn signals are in the right place, manufacturers *will* catch on and start neglecting to put an engine under the hood altogether. What makes it go isn't the motions you make with the interface, you Cargo-Cult people, you.
My XP desktop looks a lot like my Windows 95 desktop did almost 10 years ago. My Linux desktop is a little different (default bluecurve theme), but the general concepts are the same. People like familiarity, and a 2D theme goes well with a 2D display.
What I expect in 10 years, if the past 10 years are any indication of the speed of desktop evolution:
* Better displays on average. Big, crisp, bright, high resolution, high contrast, and especially wider.
* Similar UI elements as today, plus a few new ones. People don't like change if it involves taking something away.
* Faster response. Programs will load almost instantly. Maybe they'll just load when you install them, and be swapped out to non-volatile ram when not in use. Though 10 years ago I might have predicted we'd have this by now.
* Resolution independence. Quality aside, programs will look the same no matter what your screen resolution, and you can smoothly scale them to any size. I'm tempted to say we'll have a lot more vector graphics, but a lot of lazy designers will probably just use high resolution rasters.
* Mouseover/mouseout background window preview, maybe by alpha blending. If I move the mouse to a background window, I want it to somewhat show through the windows in front of it. Also, if I move the mouse away from a foreground window, I want to slightly see the windows behind it. I'm not 100% certain this'll look good though.
* If I'm lucky, maybe we'll have a mouse button mapped to opening a system menu whereever your mouse might be on the screen, centered under your mouse. This menu will be multi-column, approximately square shaped to reduce mouse movement and make effective use of space. Holding this button down while turning the mouse wheel will ideally cycle through my virtual desktops, rather than popping up a menu.
* Touchscreens may become standard, but many will still prefer mice for precision. I hope to see the ability to track multiple fingers/pointers dragging across the display.
* Better autocomplete in many programs. Tab should become my favorite key. Voice will not replace the keyboard, but only complement it. You can take my keyboard away after you pry it from my cold, dead hands. When I speak into a computer microphone, it'll probably usually be to communicate with real people.
* Better use of usage statistics. The desktop environment and programs will adapt so that most common actions require 1 click to initiate.
To sum up, if you can't tell the mouse to go to the nearest control when you are not quite on the 3D object it will be hard to use.
Heres what we do! We renounce any further graphical interfaces, and return entirely to text prompts! Then, once again, only geeks will be able to use computers!
Prediction;
The revolution will happen when HCI stops measuring efficiency as "time to complete task" and "task completion %".
Discuss.
A possible major change in how we interact with computers: http://www.eink.com/ has their paper displays - wait for a high-resolution computer display the size of your table, with multitouch input. This would force a change in UIs. The mouse cursor would vanish, things would be handled.
The future of computing interfaces will most likely be direct neural connections and worker androids.
Until those are available I am pretty content with my simple ion3 desktop.
More accurately, 2D with shading to give an illusion of lighting induced depth perception. Humans don't have the sensory apparatus to perceive 3D, let alone have devices in mass production to reproduce the effect. Net, net, the future is now and it is all 2D. Not unless we get assimilated by the right kind of aliens. I, for one, welcome...
If there's one thing that would simple to implement, yet have a huge impact on desktop usage, it would have to be having two separate mouse cursors.
The mouse was a great idea; it was like giving people back their hand when they used a computer. They could point, indicate, grab, and do most of things people do when they DO things with their hands. Typing is generally a substitute for speaking.
But having only one mouse is like trying to cook with three fingers and one hand tied behind your back. There are so many things we could do in many applications just by having an extra mouse with an extra cursor - holding things, rotating them, extending and retracting... there's an entire vocabulary of interface metaphor that would be opened up with it.
This would be especially easy for modern PCs to support as well. most computers only had two ps/2 ports not long ago, one of which was reserved for the keyboard. Today, however, it's not hard to use a free USB port, or buy a $30 hub to make room for an extra mouse. Plug it in, and in most cases it's *already* autorecognized and hooked up to the monolithic mouse cursor.
It might be confusing to figure out how existing applications that were designed for only one mouse cursor should interface with the extra cursor, but ignoring it shouldn't be difficult, at the very least. meanwhile, both new and old applications can build in support for it as they go.
This is just one of those things that would be so useful, I can't understand why it hasn't been done already. Maybe it has - I'd love to see it, if so.
Search is known to scale up very well. The next frontier is smartening up search, first on the local machine, and then in the organizational or affinity group environment.
Google and Microsoft are going to battle over desktop search. (And the Linux community needs to be working on this. "find" and "grep" aren't going to cut it.) But that's where the "desktop" is going.
We'll see 3D hardware used to accelerate the desktop, because it's there. It's going to used for doing drag, zoom, animation, and overlay in 2 1/2D, not for a true 3D environment. The Apple desktop already does much of this.
It'll look like GNOME, of course!
The Farewell Tour II
You mean the GUI from Unix in that movie a decade or so ago, the one with Dinosaurs. Jurassic Dinosaurs. Inside what could have been a themepark. I believe it was called, Jurassic Park.
I do not think the mayor shift is in the OS. I think that all our precious applications are moving online to the browser. Our email is handled perfectly by http://gmail.com/, http://writely.com/ handles our documents, http://del.icio.us/ stores our bookmarks, http://openomy.com/ stores our files... We can even access project management tools online (and for free) ...the OS main purpose is/will be to launch and handle multiple instances of our browsers.
"Objects in a functional 3D interface should probably be represented with models that are familiar, just like the icons on your desktop are often imitations of familiar real-world objects. This is a PSA property. On the other hand, tree-based organizational systems would be well advised. Very much an ARA concept."
This is a bad thing.
Just because we know how to eat and how to handle a fork and knive doesn't mean that we should build cars that you can drive like the way you eat.
Or, closer related, a bike has handlebars with brakes on them, would you like a handlebar with brakes in your car, or would you rather have the brakes at your feet?
Computers are seperate things and should have separate user interfaces thet you have to learn.
It's the computer's versatility that confuses us.
This is probably a good time to point out that mouse and GUI were pretty much invented by one person, Doug Engelbart, while driving to work in 1951. A NerdTV interview, in which he talks about his inventions, has recently been released online.
Perhaps I'm not enough of a power user. I do multitask but ususally not hard core. I don't need and (unless it was the norm) wouldn't use a 3d environment. I don't even make use of KDE's multi desktops. I would like a wider screen. I know I can do dual screen or wide screen. I have. But I would like a great deal more desktop space. I agree with perivious posts in that there needs to be dramatic input device movement. http://money.cnn.com/2005/12/15/commentary/game_ov er/column_gaming/index.htm?cnn=yes says that the Nintendo Revolution's new controler is actually intutive and pretty nice. Maybe someting alond those lines would work.
I'd certainly like to see neuron-induce input but for some reason I think that's far of. With all these multi core CPUs, we could devote one to speach (recognition and output) can't we?
just realized the girl in jurassic park predicted the future by saying those lines...she was looking at a Mac I believe and said that line....I could be wrong though....speilberg knew...
She was looking at an Irix OS with a 3D file navigator.
Why on earth would a 3D interface be an improvement over 2D interfaces? The file hierarchy IS 2D! So, okay, 3D can be used for eye candy (it is already anyway), but it just can't add anything to the current way to browse your files.
Let's say for instance that we have a 3D office metaphor, and that you have to walk through it to access your files:
1) it's still a 2 dimensionnal interaction represented in 3D
2) it takes more time to actually get to your content
Before moving to Mac OS X, Apple has done internal tests, 3D interfaces included, and came to the conclusion that the current 2D interface is the best thing we can do. I wouldn't expect a big change in that field, untill we actually revolutionize the way files are stored and accessed.
This article was a serious waste of time. The author didn't offer any new or innovative ideas providing only a seriously myopic framework.
There are many issues in human-computer interfaces that the author left untouched. The first, and most obvious, is a change in paradigm from personl to (what has been coined as) ultra-personal computing. Who is to say that we'll spend as much time (or any time at all) sitting in front of a desktop or laptop computer? I'm not the only (or first) person to consider the idea that the personal computer will evolve into a function of a cellphone or similar technology (think: your phone as your computer) [Dropping it into a dock (or what-have-you) to gain access to a larger display, kybd, mouse, etc.? Tiny projected displays/input devices?] If computing does take such a turn, what kind of interfaces would we be looking at? How would we perform common tasks such as spreadsheet/word processing? Would we use different kinds of applications to achieve the same ends? Would we access and information in different ways?
Another issue is accessability. At present it is difficult for blind users to access computers. All the existing solutions are clumsy and don't interface well with our vision-centric computing environments. A 3d interface would make this much worse! I've always thought that the data and the presentation should be separated. Consider a website with the data in one area and a visual presentation defined in another. It would be simple to add a non-visual presentation definition in the same object -- allowing blind users [or users with tiny displays (cellphone users?)?] to access the same information in a more effective way. This was promised by the web, but thats all changed now. Websites 'designed for 800x600' etc. started to appear (killing a major feature of html -- it's ability to be rendered on disparate displays). Now ajax, 'dynamic web content', and other technologies further decay the users ability to access information on devices other than desktop style computers using a GUI. Decoupling the information from its presentation could change all of that without killing the benefits these new technologies bring us. (? Think different kinds of documents: static, form, application ?)
The author also seems to focus on a single aspect of computing: content retrieval. The auther implies that the user interface is nothing more than the method by which information is located by the user and says very little about how information should be presented other than some content should be 2d instead of 3d. When I use a computer, there are certain things I want to be able to do. I want to locate data, create or modify data, and interact with data. The author doesn't seem to what to do anything other than organize his data to make it easy to locate.
My appologies if I rambled a bit. Computer interfaces are a very complex topic that I don't feel the auther did justice to. I'm also annoyed that the author seems to be pushing his own 3d interface product instead of tackling a real computing issue. (That and his reference to the four color problem, which he doesn't seem to know the name of.)
Required reading for internet skeptics
If the author finds this idea "tricky" then perhaps he should re-evaluate his line of work.
XePhi Computers sell really cheap Linux CDs! http://www.xephi.co.uk
I know bashing Sun in general and Java in particular is almost as popular as bashing Microsoft here on /. But if you want to play with 3D desktop ideas you could do an awful lot worse then Project Looking Glass which Sun kicked off a while ago as an open source project and is already quite advanced. There is quite a fun demo of it here
I'd just like to see a better use of screen space.
one thing the amiga did nicely was having menu's appear at the top of the screen when you needed them. not taking up screen space when you don't.
right now I am writing this in a box about 2/3rds max of my screen width and maybe 25% of the height why?
how about this for an idea slide out panels from all sides.
use a middle mouse button to control them. move to the top click panel drops into place select whats needed click again panel gets out of the way.
simple isn't it. (and not as annoying as windows pop up task bar)
all the time the user gets the maximum use out of thier screen.
oh and for those of us without a mouse how about using the FKeys for something useful I would suggest that 6 of them might be used or more maybe. left right top bottom hidable panels one for the main window and one for click to activate and hold click to release.
I know this concept might break existing programs some even use the F keys already so perhaps something to qualify the mode. maybe even telescope side panels or rotate panels to a depth of 3 or 4 maximum
heres another idea zoomable widgets how about widgets that can double in size when required. (this inspired by the tiny track forward and back buttons in media player on a pda terrible to use without a stylus)
ok there's a few idea's lets discuss add some more and see what does make a better desktop.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Looking Glass (GPL)
3Dwm (GPL)
Metisse (GPL)
-- "Since the best cannot be had, we must take the next best." -- Abraham Platz, mayor of Leipzig, 1723.
This I know from experience.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
I think we're already approaching an asymptote in desktop UI. Future interfaces will be faster, smoother, have live raytraced shadows and hardware transparency and blah, but they'll be basically the same windows and mouse thingy as they have been for the last decade and a half. The big shift won't be better general UI, it will be a trend away from general UI and towards a profusion of single-task small devices with custom UI. Example, ipod. Another example, satnav units for cars.
Okay here you go It's from IRIX
Don't ask why I know but I do.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
from 1988. It's still hard to argue with it, it's fuzzy enough to accommodate the things you mentioned.
One of the objections at the time was the idea that you were allowed to command a "person" who wasn't really a person and had to do what you say. In the real word that's involuntary servitude at least.
Of course I wouldn't worry - we'd still prolly treat them better than we treat phone drones when we call them...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Optimistic view: in the future, interfaces will not be necessary.
Pessimistic view: in the future, interfaces will not be necessary.
3D? We are still fairly happy with 2D interfaces that have dominated for the last 15-20 years.
I want bigger. I was excited to run 1024x768 in '95, a few years ago, I was happy with a 21 inch 1600x1200.
Now I am envious of the crazy Apple displays that run 1600x2400 or the IBM high res that is like 3000x2000.
More resolution and bigger screen = more real estate, more productivity.
I have tried multiple monitors, but it isn't that great for me. Too much work to turn my big lazy head.
One ginormous screen the size of an actual desktop would suffice. 3 foot by 5 foot or so, at 300 or more DPI. What is that, like 10,000x15,000 resolution or there abouts...
Maybe the desktop interface of the future should look like the NeXT UI. Although Gnome has "assimilated" many features from MacOS it would be nice to see also some features of the NeXT system in Gnome. These features include things like NeXT menu system and "spatial interface" (meaning that the windows and tear-off menus stay where the user puts them). Especially lack of the latter feature is a constant annoyance in almost all interfaces.
I think so called object oriented traditional desktop is the best one (at least the best one we can build within the next 10-20 years). The things I expect from desktop UI are simplicity, clean design and "things just work" attitude (no need to configure/adjust dozens of things to make the environment usable). The current Gnome gets many of these things (at least almost) right.
No matter what else happens in the world of UI the Gnome team will still be trying to reimplement Windows 95 - badly.
If you imagine a future 3d desktop as a box, then you can allways just use the input device we use now. the scroll wheel can be used for zomm, or for changing the angle of its direction. A 3d interface doesn't need a 3d input device. Personally I'm waiting for the screen they use in minority report, but I also liked the desk in the island; the desktop is the desktop. That is kind of cool.
A computer is a tool, but I am not. I use Linux
On a future desktop interface, computers will display such technical articles without the 90 percent of advertisement on each page and without a wikipedian linking orgie.
What nobody pushing 3D seems to really get is that it's not the 2D desktop metaphor they need to re-work, but the very basic elements of Window, Icon, Menu, Pointer. I mean, what is a 3D menu and what value does it bring over a 2D one? Hell, how many 3D games are still using 2D menus? For all the talk of a 3D desktop being just around the corner, I never hear about how even the most basic elements will be implemented or their advantages over the common 2D solutions.
Perhaps 10 years is a bit too soon, but at some point people are going to be less willing to deal with *ANY* UI. Voice activation all the way. (yes, yes, and it's been right around the corner for the last 30 years)
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
-The future desktop interface will use more eye candy, running slower than ever.
-It will have poor compromises that do no good to anyone.
-It will be worse than Windows XP ever could hope to be at 'helping you'.
-It will have such ungodly horrible default settings that you'll think it's absolute crap until you've tweaked it for a year.
Oh, yeah, that's what we've had since the late 90s.
How about thinking about what people need to do, and what they do to do that? Pay attention to Fitts' Law. Set up menus, with the default under the mouse, for drag actions (like KDE's file dragging just about does). Standardize keyboard and mouse actions. Get fields in all apps working together (I still can't drag text from Firefox into OpenOffice Writer...).
Current GUIs have most of the features they need, but don't use them; trying to be dumb, instead of good.
A perfect example of this, which also ignores Fitt's law pretty well, is that KDE defaults to keeping window borders when maximizing. Why?
All one can say about that article is that the author is apparently completely unqualified to say anything about the future of user interfaces.
If you want to know what's coming, have a look at recent proceedings of the various computer science publications, in particular human computer interaction conferences. Most of the stuff you see in Macintosh and Windows today was published in that form years ago, and the interfaces you are likely going to see in a decade are among those published today.
Star Trek - The Next Generation gave us the answer of where interfaces should be heading to: job-centric interfaces are the future. I do not know if voice recognition and natural text processing will ever occur, but what I have seen in ST-TNG was more than enough to persuade me that the job-centric interface is the best way to go.
A job-centric interface is an interface that presents minimal information to the user: just the information needed for the current task. In a USS Enterprise viewscreen, the computer screen was occupied by the useful data and the available actions, and nothing more. They were no task bars, no windows, no visually-distracting information.
Web browsers are successful because they are job-centric: each page contains the data for the current job at hand, without too many actions to do at any given time. Web pages loaded with tens or hundreds of links are usually labelled as bad interfaces. There are no overlapping windows.
If job-centric interfaces catch on, then it will not be a step forward, but actually it will be a step backwards, in the 70s, where computer applications where menu-driven: the user selected a menu option, then a new screen came up with all the relevant information for the selected job. Some action key allowed the user to go back to the previous menu...
3d interfaces will never catch on, because the Z perspective creates more problems that it solves. Virtual reality environments are also very good for games, but not for office work.
Welcome to IRIX circa 1995... remember fsn?
Debug the operating systems FIRST, then add enormous layers of new complexity.
As usual, the engineers at Silicon Graphics were way way way ahead of the curve... the IRIX windowmanager has been called '4Dwm' since the early 90's. In fact the IRIX 'Indigo Magic Desktop' is still pretty sweet for something that has not seen serious development since 1997-8.
Too bad the engineers have been let down by incompetent management for almost as long...
- It took western civilisation 2000 years to ensure popular literacy, and now we work with icon driven GUI's. Go figure.
Do you really believe that working on some code or on some document requires more than 2 dimensions? Well, yeah, we move windows one on top of the other, but rather than that we don't need 3D. In our eyes the wolrd becomes mostly flat anyway, and I don't think that 3D fonts are all that much better than good 2D fonts.
What is a document? Is it a collection of pages with data on them or is it a collection of data with a layout superimposed on top (sort of like html + css)? I find the latter description being more useful to me. I remember the good old green on black days with all text on the screen being equal. Today I still use that paradigm in a command prompt or in a shell, but even there you can make it use different collors for different purposes if you want to spend the time. What was the most useful development that I saw in code handling over the past 18 years? IDEs like Eclipse that not only allow text editing, but understand the context of the work you are doing. It is great to be able to modify a method or a package name for example and see it propagate across the entire project without you going through all that work manually. What about auto-suggestions for corrections? (Ctrl+1 in Eclipse for example.) This is the kind of stuff that makes life easier, makes coding faster and less error prone. Will 3D Eclipse make my life easier? I don't see how. It's not impossible but I don't see why I need a real 3D where smart 2D does just fine.
From this I can make a leap of faith and suggest that it is the understanding of the context of the work a user is doing on his/her computer that is more important than the presentation. Presentation should only be improved in terms of better handling of the context. Now if 3D helps in some cases to handle the context better, then be it, use 3D. I know I would like to be able to visit places I've never being to in 3D. Here are examples of handling context better by using 3D metaphor: 3D maps, 3D object descriptions (like autocad models.) In this case what else could possibly be better than 3D? Nothing really.
But don't add these 'niceties' to the interface just because it will 'look prettier'. Add them because they will let the computer to better handle context of the work the human is going to be doing and thus will help the human to be more productive/to be less stressed about things/to be able to do things faster and with fewer errors.
You can't handle the truth.
Ah, the future of the computer desktop. I was waiting to read some interesting comments by all those who claim that FVWM or Blackbox/Fluxbox is the ultimate desktop environment - and that if you think putting rounded corners, animations or other visually appealing elements into the mix you're an idiot who shouldn't be using computers in the first place. Maybe this applies to people-of-the-future as well.
:(
Haven't found any yet though, they're usually there
www.freshpilot.com
What about the poor bastards in tech support? It's hard enough to explain things as it is. Just imagine trying to navigate someone through a 3-D desktop over the phone. -- "No, Mrs. Thompson, it's back and to the left, no back and to the left.... Being on the call floor would be just like a never ending screening of JFK.
Nice. Thanks for point me to the truth.
Beer! It's what's for breakfast!
I think one of the greatest advancements I would like to see is GUIs that actually give the end user extremely fine control over it both through GUI and not just code (although the full cofigurability should be avialable via both). It seems few UIs achieve that today and ram what the developers idea of good UI design is down the throats of the users and arrogantly assume that what works best for them works best for everyone. In reality, what may be perfect for one person may be useless for another, and a feature which seems useless to one person may be essential and indespensible to another. I think users should be given complete freedom to completely configure GUI software to their needs, rather than have very rigid behaviours forced upon them by developers who think their way is the only way.
I think we also need more features and functionality, but it should be up to the user to decide for themselves what to use, i think a 3D paradigm would be quite interesting. But of course it should not be rammed down peoples throats. It sometimes offends me how a few seem to take it upon themselves to decide how everyone else has to use their computer.
...when DOS was mainstream and Windows was not yet around. I remember an article criticizing the user interfaces of the Mac and Amiga, calling them WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menu, Pointers); while DOS was HEFT (but I forgot what HEFT meant).
Look, there's nothing wrong with research. I mean, anyone can choose to live in the command line if you want. Why not let people experiment with 3D?
Why does it have to be that large of a 3D space. Why not something where there are multiple layers that you can interact with. OS X and Linux already have transparent windows. Instead of actually switching to a different window, why can't you interact with the window below the current one through a modifier key or some sort.
There has already been software that will let you video chat in a full screen that is transparent while you work on other things (http://rockfish.cs.unc.edu/pubs/TR05-010.pdf) This allows you to perform multiple things at a time with the same screen real estate.
Don't get me wrong, I really like Spotlight and the idea of a computerized assistant that I can talk to, but I think there is a lot more to a 3D computer desktop than just a 20,000 sq foot room. Think more like several layers that you can interact with simultaneously.
You make a very good, and very important point which a lot of people seem to have ignored today. Having thought about the frustrations of modern UIs, I arrived at similar conclusions myself.
ST:TNG's LCARS was tuned to its tasks: storage and analysis of data, and the management of a vessel in compartmentalised functions, and this is the key. LCARS's paradigm is functional, or as you put it job-centric, in contrast to today's interfaces which are more object-oriented. I'd love to see more job-centricity in modern interfaces; my biggest frustration is having to go around the houses to do something, when doing things should be a UI's top priority. I'm not advocating a complete disposal of object-orientation, but the emphasis should definitely shift from these objects to what one can do with them (take, e.g., the HP 48 calculator's interface: it shows a nice balance of function and object, even more important in limited screen space).
I think mobile phone interface designers could learn many lessons from this. OK, so these things are generally compartmentalised menus, but they weave a hierarchy of objects, not functions. For instance, mine has a menu that goes "1. Downloads, 2. Messages, 3. Contacts, 4. Organiser, 5. Ring-Tones, ...". But it's a phone! It should have a menu that starts with the things I most commonly do with it: "1. Call, ...", leading to "1.1. from contacts, 1.2 manual dial, ...", and so-on. Some might argue that these differences trivial, but until they come up with a phone with a CLI, I'd consider it an improvement.
I also agree with your point about 3D. It's great for visualisation, but should be used in moderation. It has very little use in a user interface (functional or object-oriented) as a means of invoking actions or manipulating data — least of all because you can't see through things (and alpha overlays just add to confusion). If 3D interfaces are desired, they will have to be tactile.
The future of computer interface could similar to props used in a Sliders episode, 'NET WORTH'.
There is another episode on new Outer Limits where people have implants attached to their brain. Implant links them to a large computer where they can access information at request. It is Episode 305, Stream of Consiousness.
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...but here's a slashdot article addressing that same issue. The idea of a 3D desktop is not new, but it would be cool if some of the big players actually addressed. I think that if they were genuinely itnerested, it could revolutionize the desktop as we currently conceptualize it.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
I must counter with the obvious: Bill G. will bring the old BOB interface out of the closet as a gift to wifey Melinda and introduce it as the future of GUIs.
or perhaps a visual brainwave interpriter, so that I can plug a projecter into my brain (via usb 2.0 of coarse), and project my thoughts in full visual/audible context. *the CIA would love that one!*
The binary-to-matter converter would make pr0n a lot more fun! =p
We still have a long way to go people!
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
I hope it is like Windowmaker.
:D
With lots of keyboard shortcuts
That sounds similar to code I wrote at my last few jobs. I was using a language who's variables worked something like a multi-dimentional perl hash. (eg: customer(id,"name","first")="bob") I had several small routines which built up a variable with information, and the calling routine would simply use the information it needed. (eg: a report may call "customer_personal" and "customer_orders") It worked great, and was easy to write. If you built this into the language, you could have it optimize the code by only sending data the calling routine would use.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
What will the desktop interface of the future look like? It will look just about how it does right now because GUI innovation is basically dead. Yeah, people are making GUIs look less clunky by adding transparency and other effects like that, but overall they aren't really doing anything different.
Windows is currently 99.9999% the same GUI as it was with Windows 95, except with better skins. The Mac has the Dock, but that was around in 1990 or so with the NeXT. Linux GUIs like KDE and Gnome are mainly content with copying Windows. (The motivation is to give people something they're familiar with, and that's worthwhile, but it's still not innovative.)
And yeah, I can think of a few counterexamples. For instance, on the Mac, an app's Dock icon will go bouncy to get your attention instead of stealing focus like in most other GUIs. And mouses now have scroll wheels, which is useful. But these are the two biggest true user interface innovations I can think of in the last 5-ish years. And they're clearly evolutionary and pretty minor.
On the other hand, I now have an LCD with 21.3" viewable. It was cheaper than the 17" CRT (15.9" viewable) that I bought before it. That's made more difference in my desktop experience than any of the other stuff. If the trend continues, it could make an even more significant difference.
I agree with you. A better search is very important. But what I want most of all is getting rid of having to save files or opening them.
I believe it should be possible to have every document, video, mp3 or whatever open at the same time. The OS should handle all saving and versioning whithout me having to tell it to do so.
Imagine having something like iPhoto combined with iTunes and Spotlight for all your files. You could start a movie or edit a document by clicking on it's thumbnail, get a kind of dedicated desktop with all connected documents, emails and other project data by entering a search in Spotlight.
We are almost there but we have to change the way we think. It used to be usefull to have a hierarchy on our desktop. It was easier to find stuff back. But now we have so many files on our computer this metaphore doesn't cut it anymore. Most of the files we have were created elsewhere anyway so why would I have to decide to store it - the OS is better in this anyway.
Also we need to create a document centered OS. Standard viewer for documents, movies, music etc and the user can decide which data on or in the document to edit with what kind of program.
What a horrible article. This guy sounded as if he had no idea what he was talking about.
... However, once you hit three dimensions, all configurations are possible without crossings. Adding a fourth or fifth doesn't have any further beneficial effect. Admittedly there is some hand-waving going on here; but the result has implications for some possible interface designs; and it points to using three dimensions.
If you draw a bunch of dots on a piece of paper you will not be able to draw lines joining the dots in all possible configurations unless the lines cross (given some sufficiently large number of dots. I think 5 might do it).
You think five might do it? Try four. Why don't you think a little longer until you know.
I've heard the assertion that adding a single extra dimension doesn't buy you much organizational power and that the added navigational complexity isn't worth it.
1. N dots in two dimensions have lines that cross
2. N dots in three dimensions do not have lines that cross
=>
Three dimensions is better for organizing!
I have no idea where that came from. What a non-argument.
That's been tried quite a few times, then abandoned. The Apple Lisa worked that way. Apple Hypercard. Go Computer, the first tablet machine. Some PDAs. It only works well if there's a unique application for each document type. This implies a closed system. That's the problem.
There are drivers that let you control the mouse with a joystick, and they really are more ergonomic. Very easy to use.
The only downside is the deadzone, so may be a better joystick than mine is a must for this.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
I've been spending some time getting psyched up about Croquet recently, because I don't see it as a replacement of the desktop. Croquet takes the concept of a desktop and turns it on its ear! Instead of working "on your computer", you are working "on the net", or maybe "at the office". It's like waking up, having a cup of coffee, plopping down on your couch, physically transporting yourself to the office in the blink of an eye, and starting to work!
Croquet is about collaboration. Croquet is about creating a "3D Internet"/Metaverse on a peer-to-peer infrastructure that can be used to connect anyone on the planet at a moment's notice and allow them to collaborate and work together using whatever tools they want to. It's not a Desktop replacement; It doesn't want to make Linux/Windows go away. It wants to allow you an entirely new way of interacting with the people and tools on the web.
What if you could have an "online working space" for your favorite open source program? What if all the linux kernel guys could log in, open up a croquet space and start talking and working on the kernel? Instead of talking on a conferance call where everyone's looking at the code and trying to keep up, they are all looking at the code together and the "talker" is bringing up examples that everyone can see, and illustrating points as necessary... and then when someone has a different interpretation, they just pull up what they need and explain it then. Everyone understands the context, because they are all there! Then, when they want to be alone to code in peace, they can do it instantly.
Talk about a file-system... what if you were working and needed to access a file on your computer to bring it up? You just pop open whatever type of terminal window you want, and voila! Someone could write a squeak version of the terminal, so you could open it directly in croquet... or you could open your linux terminal THROUGH croquet. OR, you could open Nautilus. OR you could open Spotlight. OR you could open a 3D version of Nautilus where the icons spin around your head (something I want to see ;).
What about games... let's say you want to open up Quake 3 from inside croquet. You just pull it up using whatever "accessing" module you want (terminal, menu, speaking into your computer, whatever) and it opens! Maybe it logs you off croquet when you open the game? Maybe it makes you invisible? Maybe it transports you to a special "nothing rendered" area so you don't use any GPU cycles? I haven't the foggiest what it would do. But I can tell you right now that you would still be running Quake 3, just like you expected to. But maybe we're talking about a big match now... There's a huge quake tourney, and everyone wants to watch the match. Someone could create a croquet space and put a bunch of 200m screens up showing the viewpoints of all the tourney players. People could log in and view the matches as they happen from the player's perspective, WITHOUT ID SOFTWARE NEEDING TO PROGRAM THAT FUNCTIONALITY!!!
That last bit is important because it is where the value of croquet really shines. You can collaborate with your buddies no matter what the software was intended for. You're just running the software on your computer like normal, and using croquet as the gateway. But depending on what you want others to see, they can see through that gateway too!
My point in all this is that all of these options would be available to you because croquet doesn't look to REPLACE the great things that help make you productive. Instead, it works to ADD new and greater capabilities beyond what a static, disconnected desktop can offer. Your desktop still exists in its entirety, but croquet can become the new buffer into how you access and interact with those programs and what they get used to create. It opens up a whole new ball-game for accessing "reality."
- DaftShadow
Hmmm...so partion the 3D space based on task types, or some other category system?
"Dave, would you like to play a game?"
"No, HAL, I'd rather go to my Happy Place."
Animated naked dancing avatars fill the screen, to the sound of delighted squeals.
(HAL reads the week's Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New York Times yet again.)
I think the main problem is that we are limited by the current devices that we use: screen, mouse, keyboard. The solution I believe is to create a new type of desk with a touch sensitive display, that can also use electronic pens, etc. Something like those control panels in Star Trek. The desk can have several modes depending on what work you are doing, displaying a different control and work surface appropriately. That would be a true "desktop".
I find that working only on the screen in quite limiting. I always have books and papers spread over my desk for reference, and maybe also a notepad. If we could integrate these into an electronic desk, it would greatly increase productivity.
I'm not a programmer so I'm not sure if I understand this. I can imagine that my computer would not be able to open every file type in the world but when I receive something exotic I could download some kind of translator. .doc for documents , AAC or MP3 for music, some more for images and quite a few for video.
How many filetypes does a typical computer user has anyway -
I already have programs that can let me see each of those. Wouldn't it be fairly easy to build this ability in to the OS? If they add the possibility to add translators for new file types I see no problem.
It is different when you are talking about editing documents. In this case I would have to choose the program I want to open it with. And what I can change on the document will depend on the capacities of that program.
I thought the linked video was to an actual screencast or demonstration of a working WinFS implementation.
What I got instead was a 2 minute "Wouldn't this be great if we could pull it off" marketing fluff piece with fast-cut series of animations set to a loud pop music track.
How did your post get modded interesting?
(Btw, I went ahead and read the blog post you linked to that has this quote: "The video started as a joint venture with a video vendor to define an excitement piece". You can't be serious).
"I filter at +6, and have yet to miss out on an important comment." (#822545)
I used to have one... for my Commodore 64! Worked great.
When you want something built, come see me. If you want correct grammar and spelling, get a F*ing liberal arts student.
There's absolutely nothing in this article that hasn't been known for the last 10 years. There are no insights. There is nothing remotely novel, interesting or useful. This article is trash. The author is worse. Tristan gets it wrong every time. He makes at least one basic error in every page of the article. For example, * trees are great because they impose an order found in nature? Yeah, that's just great if you're a biologist. Guess everyone else is a second-class citizen. * DAGs are great because they're acyclic? Wrong. Acyclic has absolutely nothing to do with it, it's a completely useless property. Then he mumbles some kind of crap about why trees are so supposedly great. Yuck. Next page: * Human perception of the world is 2D? Bullshit! Human perception of the world is 2.5D, which is in between 2D and 3D. Then he mumbles some kind of crap about the human brain compensating for the 2D visual system. Complete bullshit. The rest is just more of the same. He describes "Physical Simulation" as if it weren't entirely discredited (though that's never stopped programmers from doing something). And he doesn't mention the achilles' heel of "complex information visualization" schemes; their non-generality. He conflates manual placement of objects with spatial memory. Bullshit! The reason every useful computer provides an auto-arrange feature for folders is because humans are notorious for misplacing and losing stuff. It is in fact NOT AT ALL USEFUL to give users the ability to (mis)place stuff at will. And you don't even need an expensive useability study to prove this because it can be proved from straightforward analysis. And Tristan finishes his article by mumbling some crap about how the desktop might be optimal. As if! The reason it's persisted unchanged for 20 years is programmers' well-documented conservatism and rampant lack of imagination. This author doesn't know shit.
You could have voice commands, and they would be INCREDIBLY useful, flexible, powerful and fast if done right. We already have the technology to do that, it's called voice recognition.
But conversation is a completely different problem, a completely different tech; natural language processing. In order to have a conversation with a machine, you'd pretty much need to solve the AI problem. Good luck.
The detractors of voice commands are hide-bound narrow-minded idiots. One of their favourite tactics is to confuse voice commands with conversation then claim "see, natural language processing isn't possible yet so you can't make use of voice recognition".
Just want to correct an error you made. The desktop metaphor aka the "GUI" aka the PUI aka the Xerox PARC User Interface invented for the Alto, is 25 years old, not 10.
/ a0e340b526c4a07
Also, the so-called Star Trek interface you paint is really full-fledged AI and so is stupid as a goal of serious interface design.
Finally, XML is a step backwards. A HUGE step backwards. What was good for typesetting documents is really horrific for arbitrary objects. Erik Naggum pointed out as much more many years ago in this article: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg
I'm thinking ... Clippy TNG ... on steroids... in 3D. Plus, it should use up any spare CPU cycles to enhance the user experience.
The discussion here does not refer to the vocal interaction with the Lady. (Besides, what is “full-fledged AI” anyway? It amuses me when people make comments involving “true”, “real” or some other way of describing sentience with artificial intelligence. AI, to some extent, is in use in many modern user interfaces and services, if only as an expert system, but I digress.) It involves the seemless access to data that puts it into proper context based on the task at hand. For example, accessing data from a small hand-held device when you are exploring new terrain is different from when you are analyzing it on the bridge back home. This is possible, hypothetically, because the machine “understands” the data. It is not just an anonymous stream of meaningless numbers and text, but rather pieces of telemetry, names, times, events, and so forth. Some of that data is useful for the field, and some of it is not. Because the data has meaning, rules can be written in terms of that meaning and that is what would allow more intelligent usage.
SGML, and even HTML at first, were both intended to markup documents semantically, not typeset them. This whole business for making presentational markup is the result of browser wars and amateur users who do not understand why (or how) to separate content, presentation, and behavior. What’s more, Mr. Naggum has some pretty bizarre ideas as to the inapplicability of XML, it seems. He talks about how a closing tag is a good idea for blocks that are longer than your 20-line terminal. There are also complaints about processing overhead in that post. His thoughts are so chaotic and unwieldy that I found it hard to read anything past his first paragraph. (Maybe I can spend some time on it later.)
Getting back to reality, let me clue you in. Processing overhead does not matter. We live in an age where processors run at multiple gigahertz, memory and storage are plentiful, and the cost of bandwidth has plummeted. Furthermore, XML is just a means of encoding semantic data. The value is not in the syntax of the markup language (not in the least) but rather in the notion that data is self-describing.
Join Tor today!
Most users interfaces are essentially 2 dimensional. Even a car is topologically a flat surface. It's just curved around the interior of the car.
The only exceptions I can think of are a yoke on a plane, and a theremin. I don't know about how hard it is to fly a plane, but a theremin is exremely tricky to play. 3D UIs are not easy to use.
That's the funniest thing I've ever read on here. It's a punch line I waited 11 years for.
Nope, that was an SGI machine, running the good old 3D filesystem viewer (what was it called? I don't remember), from back when OpenGL was invented.
All I can say is, please keep it simple. I would agree that a dazzling 3D environment seems very cool in the mind's eye but the bottom line for me is ease of use and not being overwhelmed when attempting to access information or utilize an application.