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Ideas For the Next Generation In Human-Computer Interfaces
Singularity Hub writes "For decades our options for interacting with the digital world have been limited to keyboards, mice, and joysticks. Now with a new generation of exciting new interfaces in the pipeline our interaction with the digital world will be forever changed. Singularity Hub looks at some amazing demonstrations, mostly videos, that showcase new ways of interacting with the digital world." Along similar lines, reader shakuni points out a facial expression-driven user interface reported on News.com for operating, say, an iPhone, explaining "This device is tiny and fits into the ear and measures movements inside the ear due to changes in facial expression and then uses that as input triggers. So [tongue out] starts or stops your iPod Touch; [Wink] rewinds to the last song; and [smile] replays the same song."
And when you sneeze, it reboots!
When windows 95 arrived, I played around with its voice recognition.
I wasnt quite impressed with it, since the only command I got working properly was "fuck" which caused the machine to reboot.
Although voice control has interesting potential, its not optimal for most situations. (think open cubicle office)
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
Seems like there are some other practical interface options for the iPod.
* Snoring: stop playing music
* Gagging: remove song from playlist
* Startled jump, clenched jaw and frantic grasping at earbuds: reduce volume
I can see useful applications for this, but I hope there is a switch I have to depress while I make the gesture, plus a "hold" switch so I can lock gestures on or off at all times. For example, if I catch my wife cheating and I look stunned, I don't want that to accidentally to push the "panic" button on my car alarm so my nosy neighbor starts poking around during the ensuing drama. That would certainly be a small and silly example of this technology making life more difficult instead of better.
...not that I'd ever be able to get a wife (let alone a girlfriend), but at least I made a good car analogy ;-)
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Sneeze a few times, and you just sent an email to your boss calling him a fat ignorant pig
Get the hiccups, and your car repeated accelerates and brakes, causing multiple accidents..
And the world ends when the president, grimacing while trying to keep from passing gas at a public function, activates the nuclear launch codes.
changing my tv with hand motion. Right now this would never work think of all the uncontrolled facial expressions people use all the time. As for voice commands that someone else mentioned. I used to like them assuming you could record the commands and train the system. Otherwise the computer will pick anything that has about the same length as the same command. That and my wife thought I was crazy playing a game and yelling commands at my computer.
I still think that people using BlueTooth headsets look like they're off their meds, walking down the street, talking to themselves. This'll open up whole new Vistas of crazy-looking people. Is he having a seizure or just skipping through his iPod's playlist?
Have gnu, will travel.
I want the Cylon water interface (for my toaster, obviously), but this is the closest thing I can find:
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=1650
There is a simple reason for that, it requires learning.
I've given this some thought, and there are several basic problems that need to be overcome with the current computer/human interface:
1 - It is not intuitive, no matter how much we as a society now accept as normal for computers
2 - computers require a special lexicon to communicate with.
3 - computers do not fix themselves: if you have a maid/servant it's ok if they are ill for a couple of days, but if you have to be the doctor too, it doesn't work well. Yes, there are computer 'doctors' but they are not able to help you when program xyz doesn't run right etc.
Anything that only propagates the current interfaces issues to a new set of actions by the user will fail ultimately.
The user interface needs to be intuitive and uncomplicated. It needs to use 'normal' methods of interfacing with humans. Speech, vision, touch... the popularity of the iPod touch screen proves this to be true.
The complexities of a typical computer OS and configuration is beyond the understanding of most end users. When something goes wrong, there is operator overload. This must be fixed to make any significant headway on the other problems. Look at scifi movies to understand more of what I'm saying.
If I had a set of cameras on my monitor, the computer could watch the motion of my hands and predict/posit that motion on the screen. If the computer understood what I was saying and talking about I would not need to type so much, or even sit at the keyboard.
If the computer itself presented information in a 3D world to the user, it would be intuitive to understand what the user needs to do. To get an idea of what I mean, think of something like SecondLife as the interface on your screen, or the window manager. On the screen is a user customized 'world' that contains 3D icons as part of it's makeup. So the user moves their avatar to their 'office' and the objects there represent those functions that the user associates with the 'office'. A trip to the 3D kitchen and touch the cook book object to open a link to recipes, both saved and on the Internet etc.
With voice recognition, simply calling to the computer and asking what goes into a dirty martini would get a voice answer, as if the user asked their SO from another room.
When the user wants to send an email, they simply dictate it to the computer, like leaving a voice message on the recipient's phone service.
These are the things that have to happen to make computers more 'user friendly'. Odd tricks like wiggling your ears won't fix it.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
We'll all have to sit infuriatingly still if we want to listen to some music.
No sig today...
They became aware of each other. It's only a matter of time before they become aware of themselves!
So [tongue out] starts or stops your iPod Touch
Wouldn't that be an iPod lick?
It would also make listening to KISS and singing along as Gene pretty much impossible.
"This device is tiny and fits into the ear and measures movements inside the ear due to changes in facial expression and then uses that as input triggers.
I don't advocate gambling, but a device disguised as a pair of hearing aids that incremented a count with a left eye blink and decremented a count with a right eye blink could be used for card counting.
Voice isn't always a feasible interface, such as when one is in a meeting or when one is using the computer while watching TV that others are also watching.
Software Inventor
Control via thought patterns.
They already have animals controlling robot arms with their thoughts.
When you think of say a "pink fried tapir" it will produce a distinct thought pattern.
1) Get a "super PDA" sort of stuff hooked up to look for your thought patterns.
2) Think up a really unique thought pattern to get the computer to "start listening"
3) Think up a really unique thought pattern to get the computer to "stop listening"
4) Think up various distinct thought patterns and link them with various PDA actions, alphabets, numerals or even whole common words (a whole word is a different pattern from its constituent letters).
Of course it takes a bit of practice to make sure you "turn it on/off" when you should.
But after that, you can do stuff via the computer - like send messages to people, remotely control devices, all just by thinking about it.
You can also get the computer to take/receive a picture/video/audioclip/file, and then associate that object with a thought pattern, so that the next time you think:
<PatternToTriggerRecallProcess>,<PatternAssociatedWithObject>
The PDA then retrieves that object for you.
Do you really want to talk to a computer the way you would talk to a person?
While there may be some potential in technologies like Ubiquity, I still prefer simple Unix-style commands for stuff I do often. And which i do not have to say out loud.
The computer already occupies my eyes. Better interaction means occupying less, not more of my resources.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Just got back from CeBIT, tried out an eye tracking device made by Tobii. I guess the technology has been around for a while now (the girl at the stand said they've been in business since 2003 I think) but I've never had a chance to try it out myself. Very, very impressive.
Basically you control the mouse pointer with just your eyes. The calibration is dead simple, you just need to look at two corners of your screen and that's it. The accuracy of the device amazed me completely. The sentiment is perhaps best conveyed by my a comment made by a colleague of mine after trying out the device: "dude, let's go to a strip bar. We've just seen a computer you can control with your eyes. What else could impress us... but tits?"
Their main use cases so far are disabled persons, but it's also used by e.g. marketing people to check which parts of the add your eyes focus on mostly etc.
. . . will probably make folks look worse than a botched Botox job. I guess the device will come with a warning and legal disclaimer: "If you can no longer hold your eyelid open, discontinue the winking process."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I have a terrible time trying to wink -- its going to be impossible for me to go back to the last song.
I think with facial gestures, while cool- there are so many unconscious movements people make in a day or time... you'd constantly be looking for the manual hold button.
A scenario: Say I'm listening to music and jogging down the street. A 3 year old comes up, and isn't a brat, and I smile.
Crap, song repeat.
So I wink, and well because I am an awful winker, I'd make all kinds of scary facial gestures that would scare any good three year old.
So said three year old gets incredibly terrified, and starts screaming with this high pitch - mommy thats a child molester scream- I wince.
God knows what that would do to my ipod.
So, I'll stick with my buttons for now.
Pen, printing press, and keyboard. I don't think we're about to come up with a new way any time soon.
Speech to text is still evolving but has major problems, some inherent (such as the fact that others have to listen to what you're saying to your computer). Touch screens are the best bet for new improved user interfaces. The only new kind of interface that will really revolutionize computers will be a neural interface, and we're years (maybe decades) away from that, not to mention the moral issues should we get it to work.
Awful idea. It is tiring enough to have to make facial expressions to interact with people. When I interface with my computer I don't want to waste that effort.
And it gets ever harder to tell people who are crazy from those who are using modern technology...
Talking to themself? They might be crazy... or maybe they have a really well-hidden cellphone. Weird facial expressions that don't appear to relate to the environment? Crazy... or thinking about philosophy, or one of these.
Now we need to get close enough to see if they smell funny ... and some geeks smell funny anyhow. :(
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Everyone is close but just missing the boat in my opinion. Touch is the way to go but NOT directly on the display screen. A second screen (similar to the dual screened OLPC concept, or a Nintendo DS) that can be customized by each app or else function as a standard pointer/multi-touch input. It has to be essentially a full-on touchscreen display with full color and solid refresh rate.
This would spur all kinds of new interactions, games, and input.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
While it's great that all this research into potential future interfaces is being done, a lot of them are terribly impractical. I just wish we could get the simple things right with our present day interfaces.
How about a jog wheel / thumb wheel that actually allowed different speeds of movement (i.e. true analog) instead of being just a disguised rocker switch? How about a mouse wheel that didn't force me to move slowly through documents a line at a time, but instead had the same capability for fast and slow movement as the mouse sensor itself?
These are things that would actually be useful now, and are simple to implement with current technology. Perhaps companies could get these right today, in addition to investing in all this blue sky research.
And no mention of graphics tablets, which have been available from retailers as long as the mouse. I admit these weren't too popular until the Wacom units were combined with Photoshop in the 90s, but people did buy and try the Koala pads. MIDI has been a significant input device group too. Touchpads are also left out. Stylus interfaces like Newton and Palm... geeze, the list goes on.
Singularity Hub doesn't sound like much of an authority. Thanks for the heads-up Timothy, but a self-submitted shallow adver-blog like that is what makes for accusations of slashvertisement. Better to have specific interface news posts run on, well, Slashdot.
(No mention of the Powerglove? I mean where's the love?)
I prefer tried and true ergonomic interfaces. For this reason I suggest
levers and foot pedals. All lever interfaces should have a grip lock
to keep them from moving by themselves.
There should also be two large dials to allow for precision X/Y
axis movement of the cursor.
Random numbers should be generated with a large wheel that has a rubber
stop and pins. Simply spin the big wheel for a random number.
There should be cranks on the side and top of the monitor to allow
the view to be scrolled.
smile-left wink-left wink-left wink-yawn-right wink-smile-frown-slap forehead
opens root console access.
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I cannot be the only person to have ever read the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. They have clearly stolen Zaphod's stereo. The point being he has to sit completely and totally still in order to listen to any kind of music, because even the slightest gesture will change the challenge/volume/etc.
Disclaimer: I am a UI designer, and it's been the way I've earned my living for the past eight years.
All the "revolutionary" UIs that we've seen like Siftables and perceptive pixels appear to make a major assumption that I don't accept: that dispensing with the virtualisation of data and our interaction with it is automatically good.
Bringing data and its manipulation "into our world" (as the Siftables guy puts it) seems to me to be a completely retrograde step. One of the reasons why we have computers in the first place is because our world and our physiology is in fact VERY BAD at manipulating large numbers of objects, or pouring paint from one place to another to create the right colour. Keyboards and mice, command lines and pipes, even folders and sub-folders (maybe), are several orders of magnitude better and more flexible at controlling the entropy that we need to control in order to get stuff done. We spent the last 10,000 years working that out - why the hell are we trying to re-discover our inefficiencies?
I suspect the reason for this is because designing improvements to current UI is in fact very, very hard indeed. Of course, there is another reason: self-promotion by academics hoping to be given jobs heading up large corporate R&D departments for ten times their MIT salaries. But I'll let that pass.
Basically, anyone who things humans have a future in significant problem-solving through the manipulation of real-world objects either doesn't understand the past, or is so used to the efficiencies that current human-computer UI models bring that they have ceased to understand them. The key to this understanding is an extreme abstraction of the real world, not its re-creation.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
That will of course work fine when you have a cold, if you're deaf, have speech impediments, communication difficulties, etc... The keyboard will only become obsolete when something as accessible can replace it, ditto for the mouse. I'm pretty sure we will just multiply the interfaces actually.
*nod, smile, tongue, wink wink, tongue*
- "Is that guy mentally retarded?"
- "No, he's just operating his iPod. Note the earplugs."
Once again I see that the "sphincter mouse" has been left out! Simple, low-tech, low power and providing truly hands-free operation.
HMD of at least 800x600 with headtracking and a virtual desktop that is, say, 4000x3000. Looking spatially by moving my head is a lot easier than tabbing or switching desktops, and I could retain the spatial-memory of my always open windows.
I've got multiple monitors now, but there is only so far that can go, physically. Sure, I'd lose the peripherial vision of those other screens, but I could have screens all around me instead of just what fits on my desk.
The vuzix vr920 looks tempting, but it is only 640x480 and I'd probably have to make my own drivers for the 3DoF tracker.
The first of the new paradigms should be "you can customize it to your liking." I have a Kindle, which I absolutely love, but I would change a couple of the buttons around and actually disable one if I could - I should be able to configure them how I want them, but I can't. I also have a couple of video game consoles and would love to be able to set the control configurations up for all my shooter-type games to work the same way. Jump should (for me) always be in a certain spot, same for shooting, etc. It's all software now and I don't know why they don't let me do this kind of thing.
The second of the new paradigms is the way information is presented. I want to be able to have more ubiquitous information displays - let me have a small HUD that gets projected onto my glasses that shows certain bits of data that I choose (kind of like the Dashboard in OS X) and arrayed in a way I like. Also make displays context sensitive - when I'm indoors, say at my office, have my display use an RFID chip or something to know that I'm at the office and configure my display to office tasks (email, internal IM, calendar, etc.) vs. when I'm outdoors and might want something else like temperature/weather/time, bus schedule, an arrow showing the route I need to take to get where I'm going, map, whatever I want). Basically augmented reality. I could have as much or as little info displayed as I wanted.
I dream of things like having a device capable of doing facial recognition and giving me a little info (public profile) on people I meet (and only if they are willing to share that/allow it to be accessed) or that could listen to music around me and let me know the artist/song, or that I could look at a bar-code and blink (or something) and it'd give me info on that, or could test the air and tell me what I'm smelling, etc.
For the inevitable "Why would you want that/you'd drown in data!" complaints - it's a choice. Just as sometimes I choose to turn my cellphone off or to not answer my email, I could choose to turn all this stuff off if I wanted to be without it.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
This is fun. I'm sure it's a great device, and I can think of loads of tihngs to control with it. But I swear to you, when I'm listening to music, the last thing I'm going to do is to put something in my ear!
If the voice recognition works without the voice...
Some people have been working on this for a while: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocal_recognition
A company (Ambient) also seems to be productising the technology and they even have some video demos online, although even from those you can see there is some way to go still. See: http://theaudeo.com/tech.html
A couple of companies (http://www.emotiv.com and http://www.ocztechnology.com/) are already working on products utilizing direct "mind control" style interfaces (previously posted on ./ here: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/22/138201 among others).
Interestingly both of those products also utilize facial expression recognition to supplement the basic "mind reading" done by the probes attached to your head!
I'd like to see where this technology goes outside of the gaming industry, far better to be able to use it to control a full computer UI.
I think most of the HCI mentioned in the article is some what unrealistic or inefficient. There is a more practical one, aiming at font projected presentations, video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZIaLI7-pBs
They just aren't cool. I see tech stuff all the time that's cool and this just isn't that cool.
I dunno what it is but I don't see interfaces being so weird. Most of the "tuning" he does could be easily done on a nice touch screen with sliders. I don't want to make music by pouring the volume up and down or change the tempo by doing the same.
I don't pick up my turntable and tilt it to increase the pitch. I have a nice handy pitch slider for that. This seems like reinventing the wheel.
"Pouring" on some more warp speed with a siftable!?
Obviously, the best interface is no interface at all. Something that can access a certain level of our thoughts. So we can think LOUDLY of words such as: forward, backward, faster, slower, select, select all, enter. Etc...
Of course the human interface tech should be pursued, it's just that every person will decide where and when they want to use it vs a traditional UI. I know that I wouldn't want to use any of these right now. But I might want to use multi-touch UI in a few years. Brain-Computer Interface? No way. But I can see how it would have interesting military applications.
So...anything related to music, games, entertainment of any other kind...anything related to the non-work world, that's of no interest to you?
Ok, I kind of get your real point: that we spend most of our days in cubes, so we should be more interested in stuff that makes that part of our life better. But what if we take a look at the fundamental assumption that work should be done from cubes? New interfaces, smarter setups that allow you to focus on the 10% of your job at which you really matter or excel, and have more leisure time. I would love to spend my day enjoying the outdoors, and being called on for my expertise 'on-demand'.
1Imagine that you were in a meeting discussing your business/app/whatever, and you have several apps running in your wearable interface that are recording/transcribing/annotating/etc the conversation. You don't take notes by hand, you have a computer doing it for you, and when you make a gesture, the computer knows to do some contextual research for you, and to include links in the notes it's produced for you. When you make another gesture, it means add it to your to-do list.
Just a few thoughts, I gotta go, the pizza is here.
-t.
retarded.
random joes already say people talking 'to a computer' (say, in a IM session or something) are strange, imagine if they enter somewhere and see a person randomly putting his tongue out, winking and blinking frenetically?
instead, they could use some kind of device or even your normal usb camera with some calibration software to pinpoint where are you looking at the screen, even if it's not pixel accurate, it would still be very useful...say you want more browsing space, so you put your browser in fullscreen mode, then you want to quickly swap to another application, just LOOK down the screen, where most 'task bars' are located, it'll temporarily show up , allowing you to then click it using your mouse, look back to the center of the screen, bars disappear... put a clock on the upper right corner, peek at it and it shows you the time, briefly
that would be useful and wouldn't even have a learning curve....we have to focus at different parts of the screen to be able to use a computer, the device/camera would just tap into this unused 'looks' :P
just my 2yen
Nothing will compare to the comfort and "home-i-ness" of a SmartHome..A stove-top that composes and records your exact recipes as you toss in (what to you are) random amounts of various ingredients. You can just say outloud what you're putting in, get the exact recipe, rate it, group it, and have it sent to your vacation house (or your boss's house) at a moment's notice.. Have lighting and temperature control (humidity control, from your home's green-room) also easily saveable, vocally and "scratch pad" modifiable, [scratch pad or infra-red keyboard will be small hand-held or implantable device, which creates a data-entering zone on any surface you have around. Or it can be a scratch pad that you write on with some special escribulator... your typing/writing gets perceived by the beaming device, saved, and then wirelessly transmitted to the SmartHome], and transferrable to other properties (or only those in your "neighborhood"). The possibilities are endless..The technology that will really send this off will be standards-legislation to ensure global validity and universality of the memory and internet functions that essentially make-up SmartHome technology. Then they can be reliably incorporated into every architectural and construction activity with ease..
CLI is good from day one. Maybe in the near future we'll see a revival of the CLI. By then, instead of doing I/O redirections we'll be doing mind redirections. Instead of piping the stdout to another program's stdin we just piping our ideas to other users in the network. Hmm, in the beginning was the command line...
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
I'd just like a big button that I can press and it does all my work for the day.
If you're going to do wishful thinking and pie in the sky, at least do it properly.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The iPod/iPhone control could be interesting, but as for not wanting to appear as a lunatic escaped from a Bugs Bunny cartoon (more than now, anyways) it would have to be quite sensitive, with the following difficulties...
did i just call 911, or was it a yawn?
the others are even worse at this stage, it requires you to learn new interfaces, (moving blocks on a surface? turn a cube the wrong way, you just killed a server) or the way you interact with it physically implies bad physiognomy, or at least something you would hate working with 8+ hours a day.
My money's on touchscreens as keyboard (olpc v2 style)/surfaces coupled with voice recognition.
I would love a Wiimote style / voice recognition control set for mediacenters, though.
~men are from earth. women are from earth. deal with it.~
How about a mouse with a joystick on top? that would leave one hand for all motion control and the other for the rest of the keyboard. Perhaps there is such a product already and I am just unaware of it.
What's with the product placement - why not "Say, a Motorola V980"? TFA doesn't even mention Iphone AFAICT. This is Slashdot not some dumbed-down tabloid, you can say "phone" without us having to be given as example of one.
Next we'll be having "Now you can view a webpage ... on the Iphone" - but wait, we did have that one last week.
mod +0 "Obvious troll, but beautiful in its simplicity"
Always back up, never back down. ---- Think you're cool 'cos your uid is prime? Take mine, modulo the one digit integers
If you watched the Parody video for 'surface' you can skip this post...
SO rather than improve upon the interfaces that we have, everybody is looking for something brand new so that all the software and hardware we've already bought and learned how to use effectively can be flushed down the toilet and we can buy all new technology, which is slower, less efficient and requires re-learning everything. Great. Go Humanity.
All I want is a tactile touch surface for my laptop... use that morphing technology from the Intel cellphone article (yes it's several posts in the future)... and make me a touch screen / pad that can change shape subtly so I can have a 'keyboard', a 'notepad' a 'game pad' and a whole lot of slightly different touch interfaces that are customized for the application I'm running.
We don't need new ways to interact, we just need to enhance the existing interactions. As another poster mentioned, we are built to use our hands to manipulate our world, our eyes, ears and other sensory organs observe these manipulations and our brain has specialized libraries for reacting via our hands that we don't even have to think about, once trained they just happen.
So inventors/researchers... stop trying to change the world completely... start trying to make the world better by enhancing what already works. Yes for the last time, I really do need 'a better mousetrap', so start building.
If you need to make something really new, research/invent better materials to work with so someone else can use them to create devices people want.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
it's weird enough having people talking on bluetooth headsets in stores. They look at your and talk, but they aren't really talking to you... now we add odd facial expressions... crazyness.
http://www.AmherstburgVisionCentre.com