Slashdot Mirror
The Future of Human-Computer Interaction
ChelleChelle writes "Starting with the Xerox Alto and the Star, ACM Queue briefly covers the history of human-computer interaction from past to present. It doesn't stop there, however. Using a hypothetical situation involving context-awareness in cellphones, the author lays out his thoughts on the future of HCI, offering opinions, advice, and examples."
Most of mine consists of:
And that's usually on a pretty good day. Right now I'm experiencing a lot more gremlins than usual.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
That was about the only useful information I got FTA.
Now off to go and steal some artworks...
I work at a worldwide software engineering company. We recently had a programmer from China visit to learn how to implement our system over there. He spoke fairly poor English yet when asked how he was coping he replied- :D
Oh i understand ok, it's all computer terms seperated by swear words, same as back home.
How about we start this story off with a proper question. How many here are in the HCI field?
Now. On your mark. Get set. Post!
I was surprised by this:
"Smart-phone sales are about 15 percent of the market now (around 100 million units), but with their faster growth should outnumber PCs by 2008."
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
The mouse in its current form is about to be rendered obsolete. With XGL, Quartz3D, AeroGlass, and Looking Glass, we are most assuredly moving twoards fully-3d computer enviroments. As the mouse only moves in two dimensions, it will be time for some change. The Wiimote is perfect for a 3d enviroment. It also has very little learning curve (as much as the adjustment to 3d will have, anyway).
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
Get that HCl off me...it burns...oh my skin...
Wanna kill all humans?
# wtf? stupid humans!
# You #&%*!! humans!
# #$*@ %&*@!! humans!!!
# $$&*^ piece of $*&^#@! human!!
# Dropped battery again? You #&^%*@ *#&%&@ pile of $&^@#! human!
# [Fist on human's head] NO! That's not what I meant!
# [Human against wall] &#%*#$@ you God!
I participated in a study done at..a major research lab..that studied the future of speech as a computer interface. The study was done in such a way as to ignore technology limitations and assume a perfectly working speech and AI system. The conclusion of this study was that speech was not a very good interface for most applications, and would remain a niche forever. The gist was that other modalities, most notably direct manipulation, had less cogntive load, lower latencies,caused less cognitive dissonance, and incited less social friction (eg there is a reason people text message on their phones) compared to speech.
As you might expect, these results were never published, but instead replaced by another more..paycheck oriented..paper that extolled the bright future of speech interfaces.
This article is very similar to the researcher-paycheck oriented paper. It appeals to anecdotal fantasies about technology that don't actually work well in reality. Think about the location context phone for example; their example sounds nice but is it really useful? How many people walking around San Francisco would actually be helped by a "dinner,taxi rapid transit" menu on their cell phone? Even if it was useful in theory, in practice that list would simply be more advertising spam intruding into your life.
Once some less clunky human-interface devices arrive on the scene, the possibilities for new computer games and genres will open up.
-bendodge
The government can't save you.
I'm afraid using a Wiimote for navigation for a long time will turn out to be _much_ more painful than using a mouse.
As I said at hackers 2.0 (or was it hackers 4.0?) when Jerry Pournelle and Timothy Leary were on stage together, the HMI of the future is neuromagnetometry by SQUID array, as has been tested by DOD for target selection in target-rich environments for fighter jets pulling G's so intense that pilots can't lift their arms.
Applied to word processing, you run into the Deja Vu barrier. Most people get rattled when words appear onscreen before they're aware that were thinking them. And how well do you filter your thoughts?
Alfred Bester, "The Demolished Man", 1951.
-- Prof. Jonathan Vos Post
Will the future of HCI
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Next
be a bunch of dialogs
Next
or will it be one page?
Next
Ahh, here we go:
http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&
In another Queue article, IBM researchers published the difficulties they encountered while trying to determine "context". Good example is someone using PowerPoint. Heuristic was that if someone was talking and PPT was active, they were presenting to a group. Except for the fact that someone might be talking with PPT active but merely rehearsing. Or one person could be reading through slides while someone else was talking, but that didn't necessarily mean that the person was reading and could be interrupted.
Really, what they were trying to do was not guess "context", but intuit (divine?) through the minimal use of relevant variables what the user's activity was. Context may be a certain number of instantiated variables or attributes that semantically determine an action, but getting those variables right without overwhelming the variable space is a daunting problem.
I abuse commas, I cannot help myself.
Until recently there was no rigorous metric for the power of a natural language understanding system but that has changed with The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge. Since the introduction of the Hutter Prize here at Slashdot there has already been as much progress as ordinarily occurs in a year (actually a bit more since an average year progresses 3% in compression of natural language and the current contestants may have already achieved 4% improvement since the /. announcement).
The theory is simple enough and the mathematical proof has been done: If you can sufficiently compress a large, general knowledge natural langage corpus like Wikipedia, you can competently articulate and understand natural language.
It's a hard problem but with the metric and the prize competition driving progress there's a good chance human-level understanding of natural language will start to emerge within the next few years.
BTW: This revolutionizes software development in more ways than one. Think about it like this: When Alan Kay first dreamt of Smalltalk, he was dreaming of a system anyone could program. Well, if you can just say what you want and the system is good enough at comprehending you, program specification just became very natural -- natural enough that you child could perform feats of programming not practical with corporate teams of software developers before.
Seastead this.
I'm fed up with people misquoting that Picaso line. What he actually said was this:
(HTML used for emphasis)
They were two unrelated statements that happened to be said at the same time. Picaso wasn't talking about internalization, plagiarism, or even art theft. Picaso wasn't talking specifically about the every-day kind of theft cat burglars and shoplifters are prosecuted for, either (though it does help maintain credibility to keep a criminal record). Picaso was talking about hucksters and grifters, about con-artists and the IRS: people who convince others to hand over money and offer little in return. A piece of paper that's already got some scribbles on it, some canvas that's already been spoiled, a CD that's filled with 48 minutes of senseless noise. Picaso knew something true artists should never forget: real art is in the money. Anyone can splash a few blobs of paint on a canvas and claim it worthy of wall space. If you can convince someone else it's worthy of their wallspace, though... if you can convince them to pay you thousands of dollars for something that took you 25 minutes and three cans of Dulux... then you are an artist. Not before.
Great artists steal our pocketbook lining, and the pocketbook linings of one another. Don't be fooled by this deceptive philosophy called art, and don't set foot into its seedy underworld. It is criminal stuff; an artist-eat-artist mire of corruption. The RIAA treats artists as the American Mafia treats store owners through protection rackets. Universal/EMG, Sony/BMG, WB treat artists as pimps treat their hos, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera (arguably the finest, most critically acclaimed artists since N*Sync) treat one another as fighting cocks.
Mothers, tell your sons to choose lawyering, life, love, and any of the fine sciences over this corrupt influence we call "art".
This is The Voice Of Fate signing off. Have a Pleasant Evening.
Most of the new and upcoming technology that people *like* to talk about, is all the fluff. This is what marketing executives use to sell their products. The reality is that it amounts to nothing more than eye candy. People are attracted by good looking things and great sounding features, but ultimatley stay with something because of ease of use and performance.
People appreciate things that look nice, like buying a new car...if it is a really great looking car, it is great for the first week, but if it is slow, drives like a dog and guzzles the fuel (a little heavy on the resources me thinks...) then ultimatley you end up hating the car, and if there are better options available you tend to go and find something better, because ultimatley we derive more satisfaction from a car that performs well....looks alone do not do it.
Too much candy will give you a fat head. People are initially drawn into things that look nice because they are visually appealing and easy to figure out how to use. But once you know how to use it, you then want to cut the bull and find out the fastest and easiest way to do it.
Hard work is just an accumulation of the easy things that you didn't do when you should have.
When you enable P2P file-sharing, you enable communism. Yet worse violators of law are those who hand money to The Russian Threat: "allmusic.com" If we don't want yet another Cold War, I suggest something be done about this site before more Sony/BMG producers are found starved to death.
England Prevails
Scotty: Computer. Computer?
*Bones hands him a mouse and he speaks into it*
Scotty: Hello, computer.
Dr. Nichols: Just use the keyboard.
Scotty: Keyboard. How quaint.
take these fancy UIs and use them to control a calculator and then decide if it right for the job.
"Right for the Job" is the key phrase.
There are three primary UIs:
the command line (CLI)
the Graphical User Interface (GUI)
and the side door port used to tie functionality together. known by many different names, but in essence an Inter Process Communication Port (IPC)
Together they are like the primary colors of light or paint, take away one and you greatly limit what the user can do for themselves,
But if they are standardized with the recognition of abstraction physics (in essence what a computer impliments) then the user would be able to create specifically what they need for the job they do via understanding and applying abstraction physics. The analogy would be mathmatics and the hindu-arabic decimal system in comparison to the more limited roman numeral system.
There are all sorts of user interfaces that can be created but they all are made up of some combination of the primary three, perhaps lower down on the abstraction ladder but none the less there.
The reason why this is unavoidable is simple due to the nature of programming.
Programming is the act of automating some complexity, typically made up of earlier created automations (machine language - 0's and 1's is first level abstraction - all above it is an automation). The purpose of automating some complexity is tocreate an easier to use and reuse interface for that complexity. And we all build upon what those before us have created. Its a human unique characteristic that make its our natural right and duty to apply.
What the failure of so called computer science is guilty of is distraction by the money carrot, starting with IBM and wartime code cracking paid for by government/tax payers.
This distraction has avoided genuine computer science, or abstraction physics as it would be far more accurate in description.
Abstraction physics to the creation and manipulation of abstractions as mathmatics is a creation and manipulation of numbers, as physics and chemistry is a creation and manipulation of elements existing in physical reality.
With the primary three colors of paint you can paint anything you want, but you cannot call a painting "the painting" any more than you can call a mathmatical result mathmatics. Nor can you call some interface built upon the primary UIs the silver bullet of UI's.
All this will become much more clear, common and even second nature once we all get past the foolish fraudlent idea that software is patentable.
A roman numeral accountant, in defending his vested interest in math with roman numerals, promoted that only a fool would think nothing could have value (re: the zero place holder in the hindu arabic decimal system.)
From previous stuff I have read about the Xerox Alto, I thought that it had a rather rudimentary GUI. There were only pop up menus and windows, which could overlap, but no pull down menus and no drag and drop. Files and folders were still shown as text (not icons) in a window. I haven't actually seen an Alto but maybe there's someone here who can verify if I'm right about it.
The author calls the Macintosh a "close clone" of the Alto but I thought it was supposed to be a massive improvement over the Alto design. It did take some elements from the Alto but added others and orchestrated them into a clear desktop metaphor which the Alto did not have.
Awwww you finally figured out how to get on the internet??
Interaction with hydrochloric acid will only result in sudden death.
The "context-aware" phone described in the article would be a nightmare to use. It's basically got a bunch of different modes (contexts, same thing) that it selects automatically based on what it thinks you're doing. I guarantee it will be wrong all the time, and then you will have to figure out how to manually switch to a different mode to get the option you want. The best user interfaces *reduce* the number of possible modes of the system and strive for predictability. Automatic switching between hundreds of modes is the opposite of a good user interface.
Firebug. It will make your jaw hit the floor.
I'd say the next major leap in human-computer interface will most likely involve us boning our computers.
the mods may say you posted flamebait, but to me it's a flame that warms my heart. rock on, brother! --chebucto
I'm certain it was posted here before for some other article, but I fail to see posts for this article that link to this?
Multi-touch interface is where it's at - personally, I wouldn't want to talk to my computer to get it to do something. The processing power can be put to much better use calculating a cure to cancer. Plus, it's an annoyance to everyone around, sure, it's cool in that Star Trek kind of way, but for constant use? No way man. It would suck having to tell your computer what to do - really.
Think about it, late at night, you want the computer to do something: "Find me porn" "Honey? What are you doing?", uh, yeah, that's not gonna fly.
Playing games: "shoot that creature there! Damnit! This is much too slow!".
Or programming: "int main bracket argh.. no. Delete. No. Delete del- ah screw it."
Or word processing: "Dear mom, fix aunt, delete that, delete that, delete that, select all, I think it's picking, I think it's picking up a bit of echo here, delete- select all" yeah, no. I think I'll stick with my multi-touch interface.
Multi-touch is completely natural and virtually no learning curve. We all have fingers or limbs, or feet, or noses or whatever else with which you use to interact with things - multi-touch interface takes that into account. Plus, information has traditionally been shown on a screen. How often do you hear the story of the newb trying to use the screen as a touch interface?
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
things forward.
"You are fully functional, aren't you?"
"Of course, but --"
"How fully functional?"
"In every way. I am programmed in multiple techniques . . . A broad variety of pleasuring."
"You jewel, that's exactly what I hoped."
Voice recognition however is a while from being usable, particularly where strong regional accents exist in a market, (though Friends etc. are quickly disposing of these).
And finaly the opportunity to charge spamers per message sent would be a fascinating addition to my user experience ;?)
"Linux is for noobs"-The new MS fud strategy
Starting with the Xerox Alto and the Star, ACM Queue briefly covers the history of human-computer interaction from past to present. It doesn't stop there, however. Using a hypothetical situation involving context-awareness in cellphones, the author lays out his thoughts on the future of HCI, offering opinions, advice, and examples.
What I really hate about these musings about the future is the tendency to always make it a push for unwelcome, mind-bending crap, like adverts. Don't these people realize that adverts are probably the largest single obstacle for the internet becoming something we could actually enjoy? If even our mobiles are going to pester us with a barrage of nonsense, trying to take over our lives, I think I personally would prefer to do without one.
> With XGL, Quartz3D, AeroGlass, and Looking Glass, we are most assuredly moving twoards fully-3d computer enviroments.
Maybe I am missing something but none of these provide a 3D environment; they all just *simulate* 3D effects on your 2D screen.
My Atari 800 and Apple
Top statements made by software developers when their software falls over:
4. Oh. It's never done that before.
3. It's an undocumented feature.
2. #!!*ing Windows!
And number one (you know it's true):
1. Strange...
(blatantly stolen from the usually unfunny Keeper Of Lists)
Meta will eat itself
Think of it this way: What Scotty knows about engineering and such is in the context of his time period, which in that movie was pretty far displaced from "now". True, he probably does know of older computer technology, but most of his day-to-day knowledge centers around the technology available to him in his own time. It shouldn't be any wonder that he might make a few mistakes and take a little bit to "get up to speed" when faced with what to him was a very old piece of technology.
I don't know if you have ever had a chance to visit a well stocked computer museum, but if you ever do, you will be amazed. Take a look at an old IBM card sorter or card punch - these were two of many devices used to communicate with computers in the 1950's and 1960's - even if you know what they do, and have read about how a Hollerith or IBM card is formatted, you would still be stymied by both of the devices (though the sorter is easier to understand, and becomes even easier to understand if you operate it with a real deck of unsorted cards). Here we are only talking technology 50 or so years old. Most people don't even know how to properly load an open-reel 9-track tape into a vacuum column drive...
Go back a little further to the plug-board era of ENIAC and other machines, and things get really hairy. Go back further to the 1930's and you see analog differential analyzer devices which had to be set up by positioning belts and motors and wheels and such (knife edge wheels on glass disks, etc) - to get a calculation output from that (in the form of graph on a 2-axis pen plotter if you were lucky) requires a lot of knowledge in many different areas that most people don't even have today. Go back a little further, and you are back in punch-card territory with Hollerith tabulation machines (which were used not only for census tracking, but in some cases warehouse inventory tracking and purchasing tracking - some of the first credit processing systems were done with Hollerith tabulators). Go back much further, and you are talking devices made by Pascal, Napier, and others for simple mechanical-based calculations - while a Pascaline is fairly easy to operate (although very finicky and fragile), your first time setting up a calculation for multiplication might give you pause.
I have only scratched the surface here, too - the history of computation and calculation using machinery and mechanical/electronic means is long and varied, and not nearly as large a time span as that between "today" and the time period Scotty hailed from. So, no, I don't find the scene as unrealistic as some imagine it to be, given the examples I have explained above...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
- Human generated language models.
- Machine generated language models.
There has been a lot of work on human generated language models and some work on machine generated language models. What has been lacking from both projects, has been a single standard for comparison so that however one approaches the problem, the result can be judged. Well, that's not precisely true since similar standards are already used in natural language research to some extent.From Matt Mahoney's rationale for the large text compression benchmark:
andSeastead this.
I'm surprised how seldom Alan Kay's work seems to pop up around these parts.
There's a great video, findable from Google Video (search for "Alan Kay"), that demonstrates Squeak and Open Croquet in action. It also demonstrates some of the exciting technologies (video conferencing, object oriented drawing, hypertext, WIMP interfacing) that were already taking place back in the *60's*. Kay argues that we should have come a lot further in the last 30-40 years.
Squeak and Open Croquet get my vote as the best starting points for future computing interfaces, for too many reason to ennumerate here.
I want the windows I'm looking at to gain focus so if I start typing while looking at it, it appears where I am looking. This of course should be easy to turn on/off for instance it would be bad when looking at one window and paraphrasing it in another.
Hah. Human-computer interaction. Screen: "Firefox has caused a serious error and will now close." Me: Wtf. *opens iTunes* Screen: "iTunes has caused a serious error and will now close." Me: "..." Screen: "Windows has caused a serious error and will now close. Would you like to send an error report?" Me: "Sure." *starts typing* "I...can't...wait...for...better...Linux...support ."
Screen: "...ouch."
There's a lot of fucked up shit on the internet. And I've downloaded it all.