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A New Paradigm For Web Browsing
dsaci points out a New York Times article about how surfing the web may change to a more graphics-based endeavor. With the advent of devices like the Wii and the iPhone, the capability to directly control objects on a screen is becoming a popular and affordable technology. That, combined with immersive interfaces such as Piclens, could be the future of web browsing. Quoting:
"'I've wondered for a long time why the computer interface hasn't changed from 20 years ago,' said Austin Shoemaker, a former Apple Computer software engineer and now chief technology officer of Cooliris. 'People should think of a computer interface less as a tool and more as a extension of themselves or as extension of their mind.' Voice, too, is finally beginning to play a significant role as an interface tool in a new generation of consumer-oriented wireless handsets. Many technologists now believe that hunting and pecking on the tiny keyboards of cellphones and P.D.A.'s will quickly give way to voice commands that will return map, text and other data displayed visually on small screens."
Dragon on a reasonably powerful PC might work, but until you can nail 110% correct recognition, in a crowded area, in a shitty little mic on a 400 MHz ARM processor, don't bother. You don't want to start arguing with your PocketPC about traffic and directions: No, I said Springfield, not Slingblade! *crash*
The keyboard works, 100% of the time. Its easily understood. Its robust. It fails gracefully - you immediately see if you've made a mistake before submitting a command.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I'll buy into this stuff when I can be rude to my computer. My dream is to walk into the living room, angry from a day's work and an hour of traffic jams, then yell something obscene, like "give me some ass, b**ch!", to be served with the finest porn.
Hopefully "they" also develop good image to speech technologies, or are they forgetting that there are many visually impaired Internet users?
Enhance!
Enhance!
Enhance!
Quit jabbering on the phone while driving. You are not that important.
Wow! I just discovered that my hand and my mouse are not one unit after all!
As long as the extra flashy junk doesn't impede my ability to get useful information from a website, I will be fine with it. There have been so many sites that don't seem to understand this though (yahoo maps is a great example, among many many sites. The original "low bandwidth" version is still more useful than their "new bling improved" version, even over a high speed connection). Ebay is headed down the path of "bling overload" too. What bothers me is when a site adds rotating blinking things without considering, "what improvements does this give us or the user trying to use our website?"
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
As long as a lot of people are still on dial-up this will not be able to be a big thing.
I certainly don't want to be on a bus or plane with dozens of people all yakking commands to their devices, nor do I necessarily want to display to the world what commands I am giving to my device. Voice control is nice in certain circumstances, but until they give me a direct neural interface I want keys and/or stylus and/or cursor control and input options.
I can think faster than I can speak unambiguous commands. Using a combination of keyboard shortcuts, extended mouse buttons and mouse gestures I can browse fast enough that the bottleneck is almost always reading comprehension. This is also much less tiring than speaking. A better solution might be a combination of eye tracking and brainwave monitoring, but that's still far too unreliable.
"'I've wondered for a long time why the computer interface hasn't changed from 20 years ago,'
OK, playing a little devil's advocate here. Perhaps the building bricks of computer interfaces and their basic interaction mechanics haven't changed because they are all right as they are now.
We have developed an interaction language that allows us to express interaction proposals and allows the users to understand those proposals and, therefore, to interact successfully with our systems. Why should we change that if it is working?
Change for change's sake, when we have an established language does not sound sound... I don't see no one complaining that we've been calling chairs "chairs" for so many years...
mod me up scottie!
Talk is cheap. All this balderdash about next-gen interfaces, 3D, voice control, blah-blah-blah and how your great ideas will revolutionize the industry. Well, let's see it! How about some examples? The windowed GUI was an obvious quantum improvement for the vast majority of computer users (yes, I realize that on /. command line is king) but there has been no movement forward for nearly 20 years. Most importantly, the GUI window paradigm worked well. Let's see your prototypes rather than just more "big ideas" or is this simply a rehash of the "one day we'll have flying cars" speech, applied to computers?
I have to admit that I didn't agree with his ideas, but Jef Raskin, RIP, (original concept for Macintosh, "Swyft", "Canon Cat") was one of the few designers who was brave enough to take a clean-slate approach to interface design and then *implement* it to see if the ideas stood up to real-world use.
voice recognition as it is today is painful.
"Computer, start, programs, Mozilla, fire fox , double you, double you, double you, dot, google, dot, com, search field, violent, asian, porn. I'm feeling lucky. click"
its a slow, painful, annoying as hell process that brings you back to the keyboard and mouse once the novelty has worn off, and only leaves the user feeling ripped off for wasting so much money on a fancy new inferior interface.
voice recognition won't be useful until it is intelligent. I should only have to say "Computer, google porn" and get my results. I shouldn't have to explain to my computer step by step how to open a freaken browser.
-I only code in BASIC.-
Here's an exercise for those who believe voice commands are the way to go for small electronics. Every time you use your cell phone, iPod, PDA or GPS, say each command out loud before entering it. See if you can keep this up for a full day.
I appreciate the privacy the keyboard, mouse provides when "talking" to my computer.
I would really hate if I could hear every single command that other people in the office, on the subway, in a coffee shop would say to their computers, laptops.
For the software I work on, handicapped accessibility is one of the factors that keeps our UI choices conservative. Screen readers, high-contract color schemes, etc. are all heavily dependent on the current GUI model, especially menus. And we have to cover handicapped accessibility to make government sales.
Also, localization requirements often keep us from doing some bold new UI experiment.
I think a lot of people fail to understand that what made the web/internet a power horse was not cool technology. While that helped bring it to the masses, what really made it bigger then life was the non proprietary nature of the technology behind it. Until those fundamental building blocks are taken care of, all this talk about new web paradigms is just going to be talk.
Piclens looks cool and all, but it's just a proprietary program (like Google Earth, really) that happens to run in a web browser.
Want to use it on Linux? Sorry, you're out of luck, it's Win/Mac only for now; they say there'll be a Linux port one day; but as this is a proprietary technology, you won't get Linux support until they deign to implement it.
Want to use it with Opera? Sorry, you're out of luck, it's IE/Safari/Firefox only for now; and it will probably remain so, as they say they're not interested in supporting minority browsers; and as it's a proprietary technology, Opera can't add their own support for it.
Want to use it on an iPhone? Sorry...
This is not a step forward.
I don't know. In the 80s, back in the days of MS-DOS, I vowed never to switch from a CLI. A GUI (on a regular PC) was not only slow as molasses, I could think and type faster on a keyboard than use those new-fangled things called mice. I bought one just for the heck of it. It came with a primitive paint program and a TSR for shortcuts. I figured it'd have a niche but it would never hit mainstream. I wasn't the only one who felt that way. There's a lot of skepticism judging from the posts so far, but who knows? Resistance is normal I guess at the start. We'll have to wait and see.
It's because it works like it is. And the "new" ways of controlling aren't advantages, they are just ways of fixing the disadvantages of small displays and small devices lacking (working!) methods of cotrolling like mouses, trackballs and so on.
I wish people could learn to think of their computers more as "just a tool". Half the time I see people having problems with computer usage, it's because they're expecting the thing to read their mind. I have to explain to them just how dumb a computer is, and that you really have to tell it what to do because it's just a machine.
(The other half, of course, is due to shitty software.)
I'd rather NOT think of it as an extension of my mind. I think the issue is the term 'computer' is what's changing. I have several devices that are complete 'computers' themselves, but I wouldn't use them for anything other than their intended use. My home machine/s?.. I need those F* keys and the SysRq key. No sensors for my frontal lobe thank you. Just give me that old clunky standard 101/102 keyboard, 3-button mouse, video & serial port.
Now excuse me while I hop in my Moller. I'm late for a meeting at the Zeiss-Ikon factory.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Anything that can improve the experience of browsing with a single hand would be a godsend to us avid, erm, 'surfers'.
Voice recognition still sucks badly, even after a lot of time investment into it.
Maybe if someone got around to fixing that somehow, then we would consider, you know, using it.
I'm not at all suggesting we give up that line of research, just suggesting we put the horse before the cart here.
Or at least don't lie and say "will quickly give way to voice commands" and call it what it is. Those people want it to happen, and there is nothing wrong with that! Each tech has people that would prefer it over others. To each their own!
But to out right lie and say that it will happen 'quickly' is just embarrassing for your career as a technologist.
The other day I overheard my neighbor two cubes over say the following in syncopated fashion: "teens," "threesome," "bukkake."
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
I hadn't heard of Piclens before, so I took a quick peek...
It's very much quite awesome, but...
It's really only, and only, for browsing pictures. I don't see that as an extension of my mind.. in my mind, I'd be able to right-click the image and copy/save it, for example. I'd also be able to zoom in as far as I'd like, for very high resolution images. I'd also be able to have it in a window, instead of taking over the entire FireFox (in my case) workspace. Perhaps, if I alt-tabbed to another application and then clicked the FireFox button on the task bar, things wouldn't crash either (not sure if that's PixLens or FF).
If the future of web browsing is making things more shiny but less functional, they can keep it.
Implementing Piclens as a Firefox extension is neat, I guess, but if they made it a regular browser plugin it would not only work in any browser but it would avoid promoting the insecure XPI installation model.
(OK, XPI is no ActiveX, but it's a bad design because it still trains people to trust unsandboxed web content)
Every now and then there some knuckle-head comes up with the idea that things that are finally well-established must be done differently. Take the guys who split the keyboard in two pieces and placed them vertically; it was a great idea. Or Google's magnificently lame idea of mixing together send and received messages in gmail. Hey, they are organized by "conversation". In the end they got what they wanted, an imitation of Outlook surely worse than the original.
Now come this guys who promise to free everyone from the "tyranny of mice". It just so happens that people interact best with computers using their hands, and the computer screen is 2-dimensional, just like the table on which the mouse rests. But hey, we need something different, as if writing on a piece of paper should be forbidden cos' it was done the same way in the last 1000 years. (or at least since paper was invented).
Next thing we should have a keyboard on which we type with our toes and a pointing device that is moved with the mouth. Oh, and chairs in which we sit on our heads, and think with the butts.
This way we will be really innovative and free of the tyranny of natural input devices.
I am always struck by the people who say people don't read anymore, seeing as how the internet is dominated by reading and writing (compare that to the previous media revolution -- television). I think the reading and writing are fundamental to the nature of the internet because of the way they allow large amounts of detailed information to be transmitted and created in a way that is just slower with other types of interfaces (be it voice/audio or video). So, while we can expect more video stuff online (and alas, more Flash), I wouldn't bet on them becoming dominant paradigms.
Because of the Internet, I think that this generation will be the most literate there ever has been, and thus it will become progressively more natural to use reading and writing as the way of communicating, rather than other methods. I think the most likely solutions for the problem of typing on small devices and reading on small screens will be systems that replace the traditional keyboard and screen...twiddlers, projectors, public docking stations, or something else. People won't want to have to speak commands or watch movies instead of reading.
"Specify type of goatse."
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
..and marketing. The people with the most money as a sort of general rule of thumb are all older, and starting to feel the effects of such things as arthritis and failing eyesight. Typing on teeny keyboards (or any keyboards for that matter) is something that starts to suck eventually, and a good quality voice activated system will sell by the millions. And a lot of places are making texting while driving an actual criminal offense, because it is dangerous, about the same statistically as drinking and driving, another place where vocal interface will be welcomed.
And BTW, it will be developed whether you approve of it or not, or think only keyboards are the one and only answer (here ya go, put up or shut up, give up your mouse 100% right now and forever if you don't believe me and insist on just keyboards). The potential payout for the devs/companies who nail vocal interface is in the billions.
I use a Windows Mobile device. Involuntarily. Aside from my other beefs (the biggest of which is that they do not support anything other than Outlook to sync ... I am indescribably perturbed by that "feature"), the voice recognition software is completely useless.
Sitting alone in a room with no background noise whatsoever, speaking as clearly as an evening news anchor, I get about a 5-10% success rate.
If that's the best voice recognition out there for mobile devices at the moment, it's got a very long way to go before it could be useful for Joe Average.
-- My choice of computing platform is a symbol of my individuality and belief in personal freedom.
Now this is a great opportunity to sound off about one of the things that I truly care about, without having any kind of hope of getting what I want from a capitalist society that claims "the customers and their wishes are key".
There also is of course the marvelous wonder - to me at least - that a majority of people (or at least it seems that way) often hail very minor advancements as "revolutions". An anecdote, when I was in military hospital (many years ago, in Germany 1 yr. was mandatory - besides it WAS fun I admit) a soldier visiting the guy next to me angrily attacked me with a pillow, cutting off my air, when I patiently explained to him that the latest Mercedes sports car had NOTHING that made it a "paradigm shift" or "revolution" compared to Model-T. Four wheels, carbon fuel burning engine, steering wheel, 100% mechanical and the exact same principles as back then. I told him a "car" would be remarkable and revolutionary only if it DIDN'T have wheels, would NOT require streets (just for a moment, think about the HUGE amount of our human economies that do nothing but lay the foundation for being able to move stuff and ourselves around! and how much beautiful ground is covered with ENORMOUS effort by asphalt!), and would use something other method than "burning stuff" for locomotion. Just imagine all streets gone... I'm not even asking for flying cars which would cause a huge amount of other problems, just hovering a meter above ground... imagine all the neighborhoods and cities with grass instead of asphalt, and next to no noise, most of which comes from the wheels hitting the road and not the engine!
Okay, for ONE person in the room I was a little too revolutionary, although from my own point of view I was merely stating the obvious.
So this is just such a topic where I wonder why people keep the discussion going only within the bounds of the existing system. Just yesterday I watched a presentation on the (excellent!) ted.com website where some guy showed off a new screen with multi-touch capabilities, and how that could change how we use computers. Boy was I bored... (even taking into consideration the video was 3 yrs. old)
Look, however you want to twist and turn it, regardless of how many colors you use, how many pixels, if you let me touch the screen directly or if I have to use a mouse, if the screen has "multi-touch", if you add 3d effects on the screen - IT STILL IS THE SAME PARADIGM (to use that nice word). I accept it was a step from text consoles to windows, but I don't see how rotating those windows, for example, or allowing me to touch the screen on more than one point, changes much. Sure it gets nicer and more convenient! But only as much as the latest car is an advancement over the old Ford, not more.
So, what would be a true shift in my opinion?
Well, first I would like something that isn't even that "paradigm shift" I'm talking about. What I would like *right now*, as a replacement for my current monitor (a 24 inch Dell), is a monitor plus glasses that let me see the monitor picture in a distance. Why? What??? Well, many people who look at monitors for years and years in later years (too late to change anything) get trouble with their eyes. Constantly looking at the near is not good! Our eyes are made for moving around, and for looking at distances more often than close, and to do so alternately. Looking at the close picture of the monitor is not good! If you tell me you've no problem, well, let's talk again 10-20 yrs. from now, shall we? Of course this isn't something you'll notice before you turn 40, and maybe you're one of the lucky ones even then. Even so, from an ergonomics point of view I'd prefer to exercise my far sight much more often *without* having to interrupt my work for too long - because it's not enough to switch for a minute every hour (but that's still better than making no pause at all). It can't be so hard to create such optical equipment?
Okay, and the REAL revolution to me still is good old VR. I don't want yet another bad 2d (o
Blind and low vision users already have enough of a time navigating the existing web 'cause so few designers and developers conform to accessibility standards. As nifty as these concepts sound, do they truly follow good universal design practices?
Not all web content is visual. This new technology has its place, sure. But it also has the potential to be abused by developers who might utilize it not because it's a good idea but because it's new and shiny and because they can.
It seems like this story comes out about once or twice a year when tech writers run out of things to write about that actually make sense. In voice vs. keyboard, keyboard will always win. Keyboards are not ambiguous about input at all; they handle homonyms and other instances where voice recognition requires you to hold it's hand with only as much failure rate as the user's brain (they're, their, and there are NOT the same and retarded kids shouldn't blog).
Keyboards are nearly as fast as voice and require far less effort. Hunt and peck typists can be excluded categorically from consideration for laziness; I had to learn to speak even if I hardly ever use it anymore, so they can learn to type and stop whining.
Mostly though, keyboards were modified from typewriter keys specifically with controlling a computer in mind. Human languages were decidedly not. Hell, they're not even very good at controlling other humans or my cat. About the only thing they can control is a dog and even then it has to be a user friendly dog.
On the up side though, it would finally end the vi vs. emacs debate. RSI of the tongue would suck so vi wins.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
As for me? In my mid-40s now, I was born into the age of home computing, ZX Spectrums and Manic Miner, man walking on the moon, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, the birth of the Internet, Web and Linux. I love the Internet, I spend more time computing than watching TV these days, these are great times.
But I am NOT and NEVER WILL BE some soulless idiot who needs to spend his entire life peering into some huge or tiny computer screen never looking up to see what's happening in the real world. There are too many interesting REAL people to meet, too many good foods and wines to savour (preferably with some of those interesting real people), too much good music to listen to, to many books to read while laying on a sandy beach, etc. etc.
If you want to turn YOUR life into an extension of the Internet (or whatever it is you're wittering on about) then go do it. But then I hope in your case there is no afterlife that gives you the opportunity to look back upon that empty shell of a life you had to give you the chance to regret wasting it away.
Computers, phones, MP3 players, etc. etc. are FANTASTIC TOOLS for work, socialising and entertainment, no question about it. But they are there to ENHANCE our modern lives, not OWN them!
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
The PicLens demo appears to simply present google images search results in a tarted-up Windows Explorer. The 3D is merely a different perspective to allow more to be displayed on screen conveniently, it seems to be a benefit but there's no true change in function.
One of the reasons it looks more appealing is simply that the UI is simply prettier, the other is it appears neater. But this has been done by stripping out information, not by presenting it better. Referring back to the PicLens demo, being able to see the source website on google images adds context - an image of space from DeviantArt does not mean the same thing as an image from NASA.
The NYT caption runs "The PicLens software from Cooliris offers a way to directly explore online images without navigating Web pages." This makes another flaw obvious. Google image search is balanced - you can see the thumbnails but it's a means to visiting a useful web page, not cutting it out. Once you start doing that, the page gets no revenue.
I don't really see the revolution with touch-screens either, as you should really be able to guess from the name, the pointer was always an extension of the finger.
They're very nice, but they're evolutionary, and more often than not it's style over substance, form over function.
but needs to be contextually focused and very minimal. Contextual refers to the OS controlling which set of "voice commands" are relevant. And in 90 percent of the cases the commands would be one word. If you are installing SW or transferring files (i.e. doing OS level things) then the system switches to a very focused set of commands: yes - no - all (for replace all) - agree ( for SW agreement) - typical ( for typical install) - ... so the system would still pop up a box asking for Typical Install / Minimal Install / Custom Install --- you could still pick via the mouse click or just say "Typical"
...
... just the ability to work in a smoother more efficient way. Such a system should be fairly easy to implement and would be a great way for Linux to add a new and relevant feature set.
By focusing on a specific set of voice inputs - recognition success is much higher - and in the example above operations are completed with less "mousing around". And the system would recognize that you just clicked on a photo-editor -- switch context libraries -- and is now ready for simple commands like: crop - enlarge - enhance
I don't really want a conversation with my computer
Its not the years, its the mileage
Input for the future?
Touch screens are where it's going. Keyboards have peaked. Still dominant for the next 20 years, but declining. Touch screens are here now, and will continue to grow more important for us. Voice has some problems. Background noise is too prevalent. Can't get rid of it in lots of environments. That is a problem that isn't solved yet. Someday, voice will be the major input system. Not yet. Current accuracy is only in the low 90% range. That is just not good enough.
I expect to see touch screens on all laptops, and on more and more monitors in the near future. That is where we already are for PDA's, and more and more phones. Touch is easy, voice is hard.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
Oh yeah, and there's no such thing as a mind, it's just an illusion. Or just a ride, if you prefer.
not everything is a marketing pitch. fancy 3d graphics and effortless maneuverability is all slick and nice and entertaining and captivating. But none of that is important for 90% of what you want out of the Internet. Humans read text faster than we read images. And we type faster than we speak. More importantly we type more accurately than we speak. You can't have a perfect voice recognition system because we screw up all the time. How many times a day do you ask someone to repeat whatever it is that they've said? I hope you didn't hear "format disk" by accident. As it is, my car says "please state command" and then repeats what it heard from me. It takes about ten seconds to change a radio station -- as opposed to pushing a single button on the console, which happens in about a half of a second.
This isn't star trek where we've got script-writers.
Also, the thing says that if prefetches and does things on mouseover so you don't have to click. Umm, welcome to usability issues. We click as a confirmation of the mouse placement. People throw the mouse cursor around. And prefetching? Thanks, thirty links on a page and you prefetch them all. Thanks for trading one performance issue for another by consuming my bandwidth, gee that's great.
Things haven't changed in 20 years, I guess that's since the mouse, because we haven't changed in any significant way. Voice commands are demented for any efficient tool control. Think about voice commanding a hammer, or a screw driver. There's an accuracy involved in using tools, and there's an ambiguity in human language. They just don't mix.
The next stage of human interface is the one that I've been stating for a while now. It's the common wearable interface to get rid of displays on everything, and get rid of buttons on everything. So my stove can have burners and nothing else, and my oven can have a door and nothing else. Still want the keyboard, until you can read my thoughts accurately -- scratch that; until I can focus my thoughts accurately.
I've wondered for a long time why the computer interface hasn't changed from 20 years ago
Because it works.
Whereas all the attempts at shifting the paradigms to an extension of your soul (or whatever), just result in unusable exercises in masturbation (and not the kind the internet was invented for).
Remember how Flash was going to be the future of the web? Yeah.
sic transit gloria mundi
"... I had a near death experience... the world went Blue with white symbols, before my eyes..."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
There's also the tiny problem that the devices that would most benefit from voice commands (ie mobile devices) are specifically designed to be used in situations where voice commands are impractical (ie in public).
Take a look around you in a coffee shop or on the subway one day - now imagine that everyone with a crackberry or PDA is constantly yelling at said crackberry or PDA to overcome ambient noise.
I seriously doubt we'll see significant improvements in mobile UI until direct brain interfaces get here, which might be a while.
sic transit gloria mundi
I'm icon-impaired. Seriously. My mind cannot make the subconscious connection between an icon or graphic and what said graphic is supposed to represent. Over the years, I've forced myself to recognize a floppy disk as "save," and a printer as "print". The rest mean nothing to me. When I use OpenOffice or any other graphic-intensive program, I must either (1) memorize various keyboard shortcuts, or (2) hover over the toolbar icons to find the one I want. For obvious reasons, my editor of choice is one that doesn't require me to decode icons. Nearly every graphical "decode" operation requires conscious thought as well as a process of elimination to narrow down the choices to a set of possibilities from which I will (hopefully) select the correct one. Many times I'm wrong.
Almost everything I do is on the CLI. I've been programming for nearly two decades, and I have no problems selecting textual tokens out of a field of similar-looking text. But give me a set of small, information-deprived graphics to decode, and I fall flat on my face.
I can't be alone in this. Surely others have this same cognitive disability.
Even funnier is when the keyboard demonstrates that the user cannot spell.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
"About to display Goatse
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
The "new paradigm" for the internet is figuring out ways to make it look good on tiny screens. Current web design usually involves a small bit of content surrounded by banners, ads, menus, and similar dreck. None of that stuff fits on the small screen. The big screen is forgiving of bad layout. The small screen is not.
Navigation probably needs to be popup-based. You can't afford the screen real estate for keeping menus on screen all the time. A unified grammar for popup behavior is needed in web browsers. Users need to know what to expect when they ask for something to change on screen.
I suspect we'll see a migration to laptops with smaller screens, with better use of screen real estate. Big laptops may go the way of the shoulder-carried boom box.
A shoe maker from Texas gets quoted in the New York Times about computer interfaces, and I can't even get quoted in the local newspaper.
3. Mathematics.
a. the constant e raised to the power equal to a given expression, as e3x, which is the exponential of 3x.
b. any positive constant raised to a power. If it takes a slow typer 30 seconds to enter a sentence, and it takes even 15 minutes to get it correct using voice recognition (and I am being VERY generous to the voice rec apps here!): 30(sec) ^ 2 = 900(sec) = 15(min).
Seems like both the word and the math is right to me!
This is of course assumes that after 15 minutes of trying and failing to get the voice recognition software to work at all doesn't cause one to just simply give up, which is most likely.
BTW, I said the word once. That is not 'keep using', despite your failed attempt at making an old movie quote relevant
One of the reasons it looks more appealing is simply that the UI is simply prettier, the other is it appears neater.
I agree, a lot of it is just window dressing. It's basically a Google Images-like searchy-thingy with smoother transitioning for scrolling and zooming and some 3D horizontal "wall" projections to add some dazzle. The 3D effect doesn't add much functionality because things too far down the wall can't be seen anyhow. I'd prefer small thumbnails on a regular screen that enlarge to medium thumbnails when you do a rollover. The "museum walk" look wastes space where the wall converges in the distance. Instead, fill up the whole screen with thumbnails with the size of the thumbnails user-controllable.
From a technical perspective, it may also be a bandwidth hog in order to zoom in fast and smooth. Either it pre-loads the full-sized images for the entire "wall" in order to allow quick-zoom for the viewer, or you'll have to wait for the image to download like any other image search engine.
It kind of reminds me of the dot-com days where they created a fancy webpage that worked great for the boss because he/she had a T1 line. However, for most mortals it took forever to load. You know, the kind of website that gave Flash a bad name? This demo may be the "boss-eye" view under top-of-the-line connections. It may be a dog on more typical lines.
Thus, paint me skeptical. It has some incremental improvements in UI ideas, but is mostly eye-candy.
Table-ized A.I.
...for showing the insanity of todays GUI concepts: Imagine you work on your car or some engineering project. Now imagine doing it the GUI way: you cannot move around, you cannot reach inside (your engine for example), you cannot move yourself at all! And you cannot touch anything! Instead you get a long stick, or with "multi-touch" that would be more than one stick, and with it/them move the room around you into position just in front of you. If you want to work on something deeper inside, you cannot just reach inside, you have to use the sticks and some buttons (or scroll wheels) to "zoom in". How much fun would that be?!
All those "new" GUI concepts attempt to create an "improved" version of the above. None of them attempts to give me back my garage and my real world, where *I* can move where I want, and reach where I want, and grab what I want.
I think they are forgetting about the number of people that use their wireless devices during meetings and classes. You can't just blurt out voice commands without interrupting the current speaker. Imagine a college class room full of students all simultaneously shouting voice commands into their wireless devices while the professor tries to continue lecturing on the advancement in business communication. Keyed commands are also going to be needed, unless of course they start implanting chips in our brains so we can sync with our wireless devices.
I still prefer at good command line interface for most tasks.
Browsing the web or manipulating visual content, sure I use the mouse. Browsing the file system, starting programs etc. I prefer the keyboard and usually a good CLI, it is much faster and much more flexible for most tasks.
Of course, I don't use DOS, but Linux and a decent terminal application.
The good news is that after this catastrophic mistake, 2018 will bring talks about the novel concepts of accessibility and portability of web pages, we might even end up creating a consortium to promote web standards that will allow you to, in theory see a page correctly in different devices and software without caring about silly things like multimedia support, fonts, current resolution in use, etc.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
I love when people bring up things like this as if they havent been ever thought of before. They're difficult, and they dont work 100%.
How do you send a txt msg by just speaking to your phone, in a public setting, especially a loud and noisey one? Or how about in a quiet setting, like a movie theater during a film?
Pecking around on touch screens will always be useful for situations where you want to be discreet.
Anyways these dreams are nothing new. Interfaces will always evolve, but an evolution does not necessarily mean the phasing out of older interfaces such as the trusty keyboard and mouse.
By repeating the subject line in your message body, you made me download 48 redundant bits. On my 300 baud modem, that's a full minute wasted, you insensitive clod!
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
Because it works. But much of computer interface HAS changed, quite a bit. Compare the original Mac OS with OS X--there are hundreds of differences, many subtle, some very significant. The interface of Windows has changed dramatically from 3.1 to Vista. Taskbars and search are two examples of significant changes.
Are there points of similarity? Of course--telephones still have numeric keypads, after all. Dining rooms chairs are about the same size and general design as they were 100 years ago. That's the way interface design works--you keep the stuff that works and improve the stuff that doesn't.
This idea that it's not significant change unless it's radically different is popular for journalists and marketers. They're looking for a dramatic story to tell or sell. That doesn't make it insightful or true though.
It's not like companies haven't been trying radically different interfaces for the past two decades. Windows alone has been trying pen- and speech-based interfaces for decades. They haven't replaced the GUI because they're simply not as useful to most people.
The only reason the iPhone interface works as it does is because the standard UI fails on such a small form factor. Tiled windows, mouse and keyboard aren't going anywhere on laptops though. At most you'll see things like multitouch made available as optional components--just like handwriting and speech recognition are today on Windows.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Wonderful article - he points exactly to the points we evangelize in the Edusim project - direct manipulation (in the classroom) - this Demo pretty sums up what we are working on -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVFsxev-2sk
Voice has no future. They can innovate all they want but people just do not feel comfortable talking to inanimate objects, especially when other people can overhear. My cellphone has a voice feature (say the name and it dials the number) and I never use it. I've never seen anyone else do it either. You look like a dork. Have you ever checked your mail on your phone while sitting in a bathroom stall? Can you imagine talking to the phone to do it? It's already gross when people take phone calls in the bathroom. One guy where I work does it- he's always taking a crap and you can hear him getting into fights with his wife as he grunts on the toilet. It's like eating a sandwich in there- just wrong.
What's wrong with text?
Taken to extremes, isn't this the society that was portrayed Fahrenheit 451?
Have gnu, will travel.
Dude... bytes. Not bits. Sheesh!
Looks like someone pitching a startup company has given John Markoff a little too much of that "special" cool-aid again.
http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/
Oh! and about the iphone, its not so cool in europe, we already have that kind of junk.... with 3G
Imagine an office full of workers shouting at their computers... Oh, wait
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Can you imagine how good a film WarGames would have been if the protagonist's computer had communicated vocally with the user and displayed maps?
Seriously, "a new paradigm"? - I don't know that is a sensible way to describe an old idea, working.
Not if you're trying to type them on a phone.
Anyway, that's hardly a typical case; you wouldn't often be typing out huge regex strings or hash values on a phone. I don't think anyone's claiming that voice will completely replace keyboards (a basic touchscreen keyboard a la iPhone could still be used for rare cases), but voice input can make a great supplement to a keyboard, even on general-purpose PCs. Especially for non-touch-typers.
As a reasonably decent touch-typer, I could probably still speak this post faster than I typed it. I'd still use a mouse & keyboard to edit it, insert HTML tags etc, but I'd willingly use voice commands for certain commands like Preview, Post, Track 42 Left and Gimme a Hardcopy Right There...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I SSH'ed into a web server the other day, navigated to the desired folder intending to delete all files, I listed them ... noticed a few I wanted to keep out of the hundred or so. Now what ... how do I select all files, but not the few, and remove. They didn't match based on filename pattern or date.
I gave up and used fish (on KDE, it's great!) - one drag, 5 or 6 ctrl-clicks, delete. Done.
It seems I always want a mix of CLI and GUI.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
You know what they say about opinions. They're all fabulous!
They mention multi-touch, which i think has the greatest chance at present , of integrating into our current browsing experience, as well as the Wiimote, something that sounds like MS Surface. Much of it is dedicated to PicLens. It doesn't really say that any one of these technologies IS the next UI, but it says that we're at the point where computational power as well as the expectations of the user base is reaching the point where we can make a new jump forward. I'd add in that material science has come to the point where we can have such things like touch-screens, multi-touch displays, multi-touch trackpads (as in the new Macbook Air).
Doesn't mention that there have been numerous false starts. Remember that wave of VR stuff? Quicktime V/R was one, but the idea of navigating in 3D was thought to be the next step.
Should be interesting at the very least...
You should have added the "Slow News Day" tag to this. This sort of pseudo-predication, "whats going to happen in the next X years", article has been buzzing around for years. Very little value & rarely delivers what was promised.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not judge information by the color of the graphics, but by the content. A fancier interface that just lets me surf crap is still only letting me surf crap.
ARGHHHHHHHHHHH!
*HEAD EXPLODES*
Okay seriously I've just run out of pointless things to say.
Could someone please help me explain why my response to this topic has been marked "Troll"??? I can't believe it!
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=481230&cid=22692850
I absolutely *hate* talking to computers. There's no quicker way to piss me off than to put one of those voice rec systems on your PBX with no way to just hit the buttons on my phone.
Talking isn't just the "interface method" we use with other human beings. There's a social aspect to it. Talking to someone implies a certian relationship. If I'm asking for help, then my standing is implicitly lower than the other party's. If you force me to verbally ask a stupid computer for help, you are effectively forcing me up-front to declare myself lower than an appliance before you will consider helping me. I have to do it out-loud too, for everyone around to hear. Otherwise the dumb computer has trouble understanding. What a really great customer service idea! Insult and humiliate them first thing when they get on the phone.
There are of course more practical considerations too. Imagine the noise in a cubicle-filled workplace with everyone talking (or worse arguing with) their computers.
Apparently I must be weird though, because I'm always hearing all this breathless excitement about talking computer interfaces.
It also assumes:
* Voice recognition always requires training
* Everyone is born with the innate ability to use a qwerty keyboard It assumes neither of those things.
Voice recognition for general purpose input (to replace the computer keyboard) currently does require training. The apps that don't simply do not work. 5% accuracy rate is effectively not working.
To get any higher of an accuracy rating DOES require training for all current software out there, now and in the past. And my post specifically excluded software in the future by the fact I said further research is needed and should be done.
Phone dialing voice recognition is so far from a general purpose input device, that if you are thinking of that, you fail at understanding technology.
As for an innate ability to use a keyboard, short of someone fully paralyzed, then yes, they do have that ability. Be it with 10 fingers, or a stick in your mouth, you will still get a much higher accuracy rating than voice recognition right now. And only if you are at the far end of the spectrum, IE using a stick in the mouth cuz you can't interact with the world around you at all beyond that, it is a very safe assumption since it has been right 100% of the time so far.
While it is arguable on speed when you compare a paralyzed person with a stick in their mouth, to the best voice recognition software available today, that isn't exactly what I would consider a selling point...
I've tried voice interfaces before. IBM' OS/2 had great voice support. But the problem was that you make NOISE...and what you say isn't private....and people around you don't want to HEAR your interface-chatter. Voice works OK for occasional hands-free operation of a cell phone, but even there, you don't necessarily want everyone know who you're calling and when. Noise is an imposition on shared space. I don't want your noise and you probably don't want mine. Touch makes a lot more sense. I'd use it.
Only boring people are ever bored.