Cutting Edge Computer Interfaces? 106
Senate Staffer asks: "I am doing some research for U.S. Senator on technology advancements, specifically in the field of computer interfaces. Human-Computer interface tools have not changed for quite some time. The keyboard was grandfathered from the type-writer, and although there have been advancements (ergonomic designs, different key layouts, even different shapes), the basic function has not changed. The mouse was a major new advancement for computers, and again, although there have been advancements (track-balls, optical mice, trackpads, etc) the function has remained the same. What cutting edge technologies are being researched today and where? What technologies are currently available to consumers, and what technologies are on the horizon?"
Tax Dollars At Work? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Tax Dollars At Work? (Score:5, Insightful)
OP: Answers - from fiction to fact (Score:2)
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. It pays particular attention to the user interface of tomorrow, and the dangers of letting one entity own all the bandwidth (and the dangers of off-shoring.)
Neuromancer by William Gibson. He invented the phrase 'Cybers
Re:Tax Dollars At Work? (Score:5, Insightful)
You want to know what the people are thinking, you goto the people. Slashdot would have a very large userbase of tech users, good place to ask Slashdot.
I heard a statement that I think came from Charles E. Merrill, that he use to walk around the mall to see what people bought, so he knew what to invest in. You goto the people buying and using the product to get information.
Is Slashdot a bad place to ask these questions, no. Its not only a news forum, its a discussion forum, always has been. Its not just News for nerds, its a open forum to discuss these things.
Re:Tax Dollars At Work? (Score:2)
Re:Tax Dollars At Work? (Score:1)
Sorry.
Well... Since you've got your foot in the door, (Score:3, Interesting)
There's tax dollars well-spent asking Slashdot.
Which? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's his Nick. (Score:1)
These people... (Score:4, Informative)
Xerox PARC laboratory projects [xerox.com]
and
Some more projects [xerox.com]
Re:These people... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:These people... (Score:4, Informative)
Haptics (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Haptics (Score:1)
My job at the time was to find new useful applications for Haptics, that were not in the medical field.
Apart from games and widgets (buttons, sliders etc), we built a wind surfing simulator which could teach the user about how wind drag works.
We also investigated 3D (marking) menus with "magnetic" grid-lines and industrial and artistic/craft applications (jewelery, dentistry) w
Voice, Eye Tracking, and Handwriting (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd also look into all the research that has been done in various disorders and disabilities that have to do with viewing, hearing, typing, and moving a mouse. Some of these things have made it into mainstream use. For instance, the research done to make colors more visible to the colorblind has affected how (professional) people design websites nowadays.
Take for instance what has been done for those people mostly paralyzed or incapable of controlling their extremities. We have technology to track ones eyes. One day, we won't have to use mice to control a cursor or select things. Just look and blink.
Combine this with voice recognition, we'll be able to look at a text form widget, and say the words to fill in, then blink to hit "submit".
One other system that is important is handwriting and OCR. Being able to write in boxes in a paper form and then scan that image in, having the computer read the form, is a breakthrough. It isn't being used much yet, but I think it is going to be used more and more.
I strongly believe that in the future, we'll have to understand computers less and less because they will understand us more and more. The pinnacle of computing is when we will relate to computers the same way people relate to each other. When they understand every nuance, every motion, every word, and even the intonation, then we will have made a computer that no one has to understand to use.
Re:Voice, Eye Tracking, and Handwriting (Score:1)
Re:Voice, Eye Tracking, and Handwriting (Score:3, Interesting)
What we really need is the *developers* to install some of these new interface ideas into their programs, as AOL did with AIM, and then we'll see how people
Re:Voice, Eye Tracking, and Handwriting (Score:1)
Re:Voice, Eye Tracking, and Handwriting (Score:2)
Re:Voice, Eye Tracking, and Handwriting (Score:1)
Re:Voice, Eye Tracking, and Handwriting (Score:2)
Gesture interfaces (Score:4, Interesting)
You mentioned trackpads, but the stuff from fingerworks [fingerworks.com] goes a bit beyond this and supports a gesturing interface. I've used one for about a year and bought several as backups (the thing is incredibly durable) just because I know I'll never be able to live without it again.
I also recall a demo -- sorry, no link -- that used webcam-style cameras to watch eye movements and use that as part of the active window selection process. There was another demo at Intel Developer Forum last year that did something similar, but turned off a notebook's display when you weren't looking at it to save power.
Re:Gesture interfaces - Finderworks (Score:2)
[q] How is the feel of the keyboard though? Is the keyboard textured in any way so you can feel where home row is or do you have to look down to find home?
Cool with the Mac Laptop keyboard replacement too.
Re:Gesture interfaces - Fingerworks (Score:2)
Re:Gesture interfaces - Finderworks (Score:2)
The problem I had with the keyboard primarily is that I have pretty lazy fingers, and if you don't to
Re:Gesture interfaces - Finderworks (Score:2)
The only thing that is difficult about this keyboard is -- and this will sound strange -- typing. Everything else is easy. "Everything else" means the gestures, I guess: the keybo
Dear Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
Please bail me out.
Attach wires to your brains (Score:1)
Does anyone have the link to the cell that had sensors attached to it, and it was flying a flight simulator?
Yes, I have the link (Score:2)
HCI (Score:4, Insightful)
You gotcher mouse, trackball, and mutant variations and combinations thereof, including tablets. Add force feedback and stir, where appropriate (slow down the mouse over window controls, etc.). Oh yeah, don't forget the whole wireless vs wired argument, plus security or lack thereof implied therein.
You gotcher touchscreens (icky), and yer voice command, and then, we come at last to voice recognition and haptic interfaces.
The thing is, humans have a limited number of ways to enter information, and depending on the nature of the information, it's going to probably have to come down to keyboards or voice recognition (or handwriting recognition) for _entering_ information.
For _manipulating_ information, you have a lot more choices, but doing so efficiently depends heavily on the nature of the information being manupulated. If you're editing a video, the appropriate efficient interface is probably going to be vastly different from that of editing plain text. And there's always going to be a personal preference entering the equation (e.g. some prefer trackballs over mice, some prefer pen & tablet over either).
I don't want an interface that uses scent or taste, thanks.
Re:HCI (Score:2)
A much better way to edit images. Of course digital creation techinques, will have to be adjusted. New toys. yea baby.
Well.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Somebody once said, though I can't remember the book, that a word processor did most of the same things it does now, twenty years ago, except that now we have rounded corners. The illustration is vague, but it serves to point out that there haven't been huge breakthroughs in the way we work, despite incredibly advanced technologies sitting on our doorstep. Whether this is good or bad, make your own call.
I, personally, think there are better solutions to things like top-screen menus, and file management. The number one question I get asked about in various levels of IT support is what damn function is in what damn menu. It's hard for many people to remember which functions belong to which menus, especially because we have so many menus that give no clue to the functions they hold -- e.g., File->Exit is a holdover from the days when you couldn't open more than one document. Similarly, Edit->Preferences is a good guess, except that most people associate Edit with file content, not program-level preferences, especially when there's often another menu under Tools for different options.
There's got to be a better way, said some guy, hopefully soon.
I always find it interesting that if we had taken any modern system back to 1985, the interface features that would be most ooed at would be the eyecandy, but not the productivity of the interface, since that's largely stayed the same. We still use a point and click interface for everything, and we still hold the contents of our programs in a computer-oriented interface, not a human-oriented interface -- the window. Clever solutions exist for rebottling some of these problems, e.g., scroll wheels on mice, different keyboards and input devices, and Expose, but it's still a situation that could be radically different. I'm just not sure how yet.
Many of the technologies we use now are no different than the ones created in the 1970s to solve these problems, but things have changed. An increasing number of novice users, handicapped users, etc., make many of these solutions a little too narrow. E.g., my mother, who is nearly blind and uses a screenreader, has pointed out many problems I would have never thought of as anything but accessibility issues, but they're not -- they're all interface design issues.
Now, I'm not suggesting that we talk to our computers tomorrow and then Hack Teh Gibson with our nintendo powergloves, but many of these interfaces are arcane. I'd like to see more seamless, fluid transition between programs, for example -- I should be able to use the text-editing features of Word when submitting a comment, or I should be able to insert Flash documents into my background art if I own Flash. More modular.
I'm just not sure how to do it yet.
Re:Well.. (Score:3, Insightful)
For example, a common interface for old laptops (Model 100, 102, 200, 600, NEC 8201A, NEC8300, NEC 8500 etc.) was a main screen which shows a tabular list of say, 30 files and programs. You moved around with the arrow keys and picked what you wanted to work on. When you enter a program it forces you to pick a filename. You never need to "Save," similar to PalmOS.
No subdirectories. If you exit your program, you're back at the simple menu.
If you hit on a tex
Re:Well.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Just now, I decided to find how many files where in my home directory. 48,125 in 3,096 folders over about 25 GB, and I have at least four times that amount on other accounts on other machines -- not to mention, none of this is source code, so it's not headers and little text documents cluttering my clusters. And the issue is, hierarchy becomes inefficient very quickly as the number of files increase. The only way I can find anything any more is by searching -- and I suspect this
Re:Well.. (Score:2)
(Ok, ok, arguably they didn't succeed. But some of their ideas were tremendous, the small basic ones, and still haven't been adopted by the PC world. For instance, Macs have a 'Return' key to add a new line o
Re:Well.. (Score:2)
Many keyboards predating the Mac had this feature. For instance, IBM's venerable and widespread 3270 terminal (first introduced in the early '70s!) had both Enter and Return keys. The DEC vt100 also did, although the vt100's enter key was l
Re:Well.. (Score:2)
Re:Well.. (Score:2)
You can also use CTRL S and CTRL Q to send the computer a 'please stop sending me data until further notice (transmit off / XOFF)' and 'resume sending me data (transmit on / XON)', respectively, when the computer is streaming data to you (like in communications software, telnet, terminal emulators, etc.)
Re:Well.. (Score:2)
Normal people don't use telnet, terminal emulators, etc so I won't bother replying to that point.
Re:Well.. (Score:1)
Re:Well.. (Score:3, Interesting)
That's the one you are looking for - character based user interface using Win32 API for file manipulation. It is a shareware release of XTreeGold from the early 90's with a cult following dating back to about 1986. It won just about every user interface award known to man until it got dropped in about 1995.
Basically it recursively reads your entire drive (or a subset) and all the directories, gets the file names, sizes, attributes (RASH), dates, and directory structure, presents it in a multi-box
Re:Well.. (Score:2)
OP: come up with a single piece of hardware to replace the discrete components 'keyboard' and 'mouse' or
TUNES (Score:2)
Maybe you're looking for the Tunes Project [tunes.org]
Database filesystems, find data quicker. (Score:5, Interesting)
As for the GUI, I think its more autocomplete of processes, to reduce manual steps.
The biggest problem I see is forcing interactive moments on a busy user. Nothing is worse in the middle of typing a document and a popup window of some kind, flash in the tool tray until im ready.
And with people multitasking, I dont need a program to tell me its done in the middle of working on something else.
Displaying information while not forcing the user to interact is the next step. We are doing much more than before, multiple programs, multiple tasks, we need to curb the "In your face" attitude of the Gui.
While AI with interactive voice chat would be nice, unless its a virtual lawyer that can answer my questions or a hot stripper, I doubt I'm going to be using voice chat on a operational process.
Voice chat for games is another thing, when your busy, you cant stop to type, talking to the group saves time, and reaction time is quicker.
Of course these are my thoughts and views of current trends. Microsoft research and Cambridge labs are good places to check out. Cambridge ran the research lab that helped oversee VNC and other cool products, under Olivetti and then ATT Labs.
I think there is much more work todo in the modern desktop before we go onto new user input/output methods.
Top hottest things, tabs, info bars, task switching, searching, auto-complete, realtime filtering (spellcheck/etc), history of input, sharing of data with other hard (bluetooth/etc) are IMHO the current impressive new features. And if not new, just easier use or new methods of using the same procedures in a differnt way.
Too bad 2005 isnt going to see many new features, end of year with dual core, new gfx cards, the hardware to take advantage will launch 2006 for new features. But at least with SLI and faster CPUs, this year will be good for gaming until we get there.
Re:Database filesystems, find data quicker. (Score:2)
I built a bank of LED lights, connected to a Phidgets [phidgets.com] kit board, and wrote a Java interface to monitor web pages and my POP3 inbox. When something changed, the interface software would strobe the light grid instead of popping up a dialog or something. That way, you could be barely conscious of a new event, but it wasn't distracting enough to actually grab your attention unless you were looking for it.
I wish I hadn't had to give
Re:Database filesystems, find data quicker. (Score:2)
Any chance your code is out there for us wanna-be's to read in order to jumpstart our play with the Phidgets?
Re:Database filesystems, find data quicker. (Score:2)
The POP3 stuff never did work right, though, so I think I just wound up deleting it.
Re:Database filesystems, find data quicker. (Score:2)
Or another windows pops up and you type your password or something into that. I accidentally IM'ed my root password to someone like that the other day.
One simple solution would be NOT to change the window focus when the user had been typing anything during the last 5 seconds o
Re:Database filesystems, find data quicker. (Score:1)
Force Feedback / Haptic Devices (Score:3, Interesting)
3D visualization (Score:3, Informative)
Cyberdildonics (Score:1, Troll)
Monkeys! (Score:2)
Re:Monkeys! (Score:2)
Re:Monkeys! (Score:1)
I think voice recognition and eye tracking are going to cause people to suffer from the same repeditive stress injuries that the keyboard and mouse are inflicting on people today.
When I was younger I didn't really believe in carpel tunnel. I just thought the hypochondriacs were at it again. But ten years of typing and mousing have just killed my wrists. If I bang them funny, my whole wrists will turn numb.
Anyway I suspect that constant blinking and talking are going to cause similar problems. Not only tha
A few more interfaces (Score:2, Interesting)
Several posts have listed voice recognition and speech synthesis. This is great for the blind, disabled, or those of us with carpel tunnel and eye strain. Combined with translation software it can provide a great advantage to communications, and even has military applications. Google "Phraselator". Troops use it to translate a limited number of phrases into Arabic or whatever. Definitely a field where better software and more computing
Not much. . . (Score:2)
But I haven't seen anything truly new - and no, 3D mice don't count.
I think the issue is that there are no
Re:Not much. . . (Score:2)
I think there's an impusle to think
Follow the Eyes (Score:2)
This reminded me of something I remember seeing a while back. It was this device for people with muscular dystrophy (md) so that th
Two immediately come to mind (Score:2, Insightful)
The first is the haptic glove line from Immersion Corp [immersion.com]. At my old office we had a Sensable Phantom, which was somewhat neat in a "that's completely useless" sort of way, but this one really excites me. If the market for these grew and the price came down, I think it would be a great breakthrough for games and other simulations in particular. Imagine playing Black & White with one of these!
The second is an entire new field, combining bioinformatics and computing closer than ever. Brain-Computer Int
sign language (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:sign language (Score:1)
Re:sign language (Score:1)
Monitors will go away (Score:2)
Re voice interfaces, Intel has been saying that it will be around the time CPUs hit the 10 GHz range.
Peruse the the proceedings of UIST (Score:1)
Much of the cutting edge research in user interfaces, both in software and hardware, has been published at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. Take a gander at the last five years, starting from the 2004 conference site [acm.org].
HITL (Score:1)
Re:HITL (Score:1)
Braille (Score:2)
Ed Almos
Budapest, Hungary
Re:Braille (Score:2)
Re:Braille (Score:2)
Start with the researchers (Score:1)
If you're looking for cutting edge HCI research, go to where the researchers are: the universities. Here's a pretty exhaustive directory [hcibib.org] of HCI educational links, university departments, etc.
I'm currently taking some HCI grad school courses at Tufts [tufts.edu], and the department head is doing a lot of work in the field of Tangible User Interfaces [tufts.edu].
twiddler (Score:2)
unfortunately the #$@$'s are charging $200+. thankfully i'm out of college soon and will hopefully be making money after that. anyone rouge dev shacks looking for a world class hacker + ace communicator?
myren
Voice Recognition (Score:1)
I'd say whoever puts some research into how to write the UI for voice input and does it right will be well ahed of the game in a few years.
In the future... (Score:2)
One person who is a quadriplegic recently (this past year) had a chip implanted. He can now control things by thinking about it.
Here are some other articles from a google and some things I have marked...
Ubiquitous computing (Score:2)
I'd suggest virtual reality 3D... (Score:1)
I just hope their next level isn't called "Knee Deep In The Dead".
Audiopad and others like it seem quite neat (Score:2)
Examples from Science Fiction (Score:2)
The old Trikorder's seemed pretty cool, some kind of PDA on steriods and apparently kitted out with a variety of sensors such that it could record vast amounts of scientific data, audio, video, and who knows what else it did.
Later Trek's seemed to show yo
2 ways (Score:1)
Why? (Score:2)
I'm interested in hearing the explanation behind this inquiry.
grandfathered? (Score:1, Interesting)
ITYM that the typewriter interface was the father of the computer keyboard.
3D and speech have been in the works as I/O interfaces since the 60's. Neither seem destined to replace the current devices. The problem is that they lack the precision of typing and pointing devices. Speech has had inroads in the telephone area where the alternative is the keypad.
The best interface in current use which has not been applied to computers is ASL. The deaf currently r
Can you... (Score:1)
Touchscreens! (Score:2)
Gorilla arm. [catb.org]