Futurismic

Suddenly, touchscreen devices seem to be everywhere, changing the ways in which we interact with our phones, computers and tablet devices. But the next user interface revolution is already waiting in the wings – gestural interfaces will complete the user-interface paradigm shift that touchscreens have started. So says Stowe Boyd:

Gestural UI, or ‘hand jive’ as I call it, once deployed as a built in aspect of future computers, like touchpads and mouses are today, will set the stage for a rethink about user experience.

First we will see hand jive as a way to manipulate the gears of now-tradition windowed UIs: pulling down a menu in an app, moving windows around, dragging a file to the trash.

In the future, we’ll have real Minority Report stuff, without the enormous touch screens: we’ll also see the emergence of augmented reality goggles — Terminator goggles — where we can toggle back and forth between 100% computer screen sorts of display to 100% augmented reality. And the goggles — as an integrated part of the computing device — will be watching our hands for commands, and watching the world for reality to augment.

The combination of these trends will make computing primarily mobile: we’ll have an iPhone sized device we carry all the time, which will be a phone and a PC. We will be free of LCD screens — in general — courtesy of our goggles, and free of keyboards, courtesy of hand jive. A keyboard can be imaged on any flat surface by the goggles, and we can type without a physical keyboard because the gestural system is watching our fingers in 3D. And of course, a lot of things could be done without typing, especially once kids start using sign language and voice to communicate with computers. (I say kids because that’s who start first.)

While we’re waiting for that revolution to arrive, the inclusion of accelerometers in mobile hardware offers some avenues for interfacing with your phone without mashing the keypad or fingering the screen. Anyone who’s ever found themselves with a pocket full of unsolicited novelty ring-tone in a crowded cinema will probably appreciate the opportunity to silence their phone with a few well-timed slaps of the hand through their clothes:

With the right software installed, it may one day be possible to cut a call by “whacking” the phone in a particular pattern while it’s still in your pocket.

[...]

The team developed a simple vocabulary of “whack gestures” designed to rapidly communicate simple commands such as silencing the phone. To help the device distinguish the gestures from background bumps, each begins and ends with a firm “whack”.

The biggest roadblock for gestural UI will probably be the software houses, however. Keith Stuart of the Guardian Games Blog wonders whether anyone will actually bother using Microsoft’s Project Natal motion sensor device for truly new gaming experiences, or whether they’ll all play it safe with re-runs of what has gone before:

For a start, publishers are massively, obsessively risk averse. If there’s any way of leveraging market pre-awareness into a new product they’ll leap at it. So even if these companies are developing titles that work only on Natal – not just new games with vaguely specified Natal-support – it’s unlikely that they’ll do this without recourse to familiar brands and gameplay experiences. In other words, we may get a dedicated Natal version of, say, Mass Effect 3, but it’ll still be Mass Effect, it’s just that you’ll act out those in-depth personal relationships with aliens rather than just talking and watching the cut-scenes.

A little pessimistic, perhaps, but given the enduring tightness of the global economy, playing it safe is likely to be the order of the day for those with the most to lose. But we shouldn’t discount the independent hardware hackers, who the Electronic Frontier Foundation suggests will be a growing cultural force in the year to come. Every day my RSS feeds are full of ordinary geeks doing amazing things with off-the-shelf devices and a handful of cheap parts, and despite the best efforts of easily-riled device manufacturers and their copyright lawyers, it’s getting harder and harder to keep the details of mods, hacks and retrofits a secret.

Cory Doctorow’s latest novel Makers (which I still haven’t had the time to sit down and read beyond the tenth instalment or so) posits a near-future economy where the agile and frugal make-do mind-set of hackers and makers changes the way the world does business for ever. With 3D printing showing every sign of maturing to the affordable “prosumer” level in the next year or so, and landfills across the planet still inhaling mountains of obsolete consumer electronics and tcotchkes, it’s far from being the most implausible future I’ve read about lately. [image by See-ming Lee]

What do you think – will our recent economic woes push us toward reuse and repurposing, or will we wander slowly but surely back to corporate-capitalist business-as-usual?

Since I chose to write about things made of metal skins and electrical guts in November, and then about warm-blooded carbon-based life in December, I couldn’t resist a combination. I call it the tender mash-up because the fusion of man and machine might result in an emotional being with a huge leap forward in physical capacity. The popular television and movie characters Robocop and The Six Million Dollar Man may be coming close to reality. Continue reading “The Tender Mash-up”

COSMOS Magazine has a round-up of the current state-of-play in the nascent field of digital scent reproduction. We can do some pretty impressive stuff with digital media for our eyes and ears, and research into haptic technology seems to be ramping up in order to conquer the heretofore neglected sense of touch, but smell is a tricky proposition, because it’s a chemical process. But one Jenny Tillotson of London’s University of Arts seems to be making some advances:

Her newest gadget is the button-sized ‘eScent’. It contains bio-sensors that monitor changes in the blood pressure, respiration and skin’s electric potential. When it detects a change, it sends signals to the lab-on-a-chip devices, which then change the type or intensity of fragrance released.

Though currently crude at detecting more subtle mood changes, the idea is that eScent will eventually be able to detect stress or anxiety and then release appropriate scents to soothe the wearer. “I’m more interested in health aspects linked to aromachology, the science of fragrance, rather than just a gimmicky scent delivery system that substitutes the perfume bottle,” Tillotson says.

There is evidence to show that there is a direct link between the sense of smell and human health and well-being. “Three quarters of the emotions that we generate on a daily basis are affected by smell,” she says. “Certain odours can also relieve side effects from chemotherapy, or significantly benefit people who suffer from insomnia, muscle stiffness, bronchitis, poor concentration, indigestion, and high-blood pressure.”

Therapeutic uses are all well and good, but Tillotson’s earlier “Smart Second Skin” system strikes me as the more likely deployment to be taken up by well-moneyed early adopters, combining as it does high fashion with high technology:

Smart Second Skin combines lab-on-chip technology with miniature bio-sensors. Lab-on-chip allows the storage and handling of tiny amounts of fluids on small chips. These chips can be programmed to release specific scents at specific times.

“Just as people store different genres of music on their iPods, this method offers a new sensory system to collect and store a selection of fragrances close to the body: a modern iPod of the fragrance industry embedded in fashion” Tillotson says.

Looking further down the line, aromachology may well become another facet of immersive virtual and/or augmented reality systems, and perhaps to some user interfaces in applicable industries; it’s well known that the sense of smell is deeply linked to human memory, and so it might add an extra dimension to simulated environments… as well as offering new avenues for psychological therapies.

But it’s a double-edged sword: supermarkets and large corporate offices are already well aware that certain smells – freshly baked bread or apples, for example – can influence behaviour. What sort of tricks might they learn to pull when any smell can be synthesised at short order in direct response to physiological triggers? [image by me and the sysop]

Sven Johnson reports back from the Future Imperfect once again, rounding up the hottest body-mods, elective surgeries, prosthetic add-ons and extensions of the human condition from a year that’s probably less distant from our own than we suspect.

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I don’t normally care for lists, especially at this time of year when we’re inundated with “Best of the Year” lists, “Worst of the Year” lists, and of course the obligatory “New Year’s Resolution List” lists. However, as a pre-emptive strike, I thought I’d jump in with my own contribution; something perhaps a bit different than the usual fare. So without further delay, here’s my “Top Ten Substitutive Pieces List”. Continue reading “The Top Ten Substitutive Pieces List”

Well, it’s been a lively year for changes in the publishing industry, hasn’t it? This time last year, I wrote a post titled 2009 – the year the physical bookstore lays down and dies? – and over here in the UK, Borders has just gone into receivership, a few days before Amazon claimed to have sold more Kindle ebooks over the holiday period than dead-tree books. The times, they are a-changin’.

I still don’t have an ebook reader myself, because I’ve not seen one that’s open enough for my tastes – I don’t want to be tied to one retailer (same reason I don’t have an iPod), and I want to be able to read multiple formats without jumping through hoops. But 2010 looks like the year that the tablet computer makes its presence felt (if Apple are going to release one, you can bet your boots that cheaper and more open devices will follow close on its heels), and that means all we need is a decent platform for reading ebooks.

Enter inventor and Singularitarian Ray Kurzweil, who has a track record of disruptive developments in an assortment of industries; his new company knfb Reading Technology (a cooperative venture with the National Federation of the Blind) is set to debut an ebook software platform called Blio at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show next week. It’s already available for free download, with versions for PC, iPhone and iPod Touch, and (according to the linked article) it trumps pretty much all of the competition on features and accessibility. Blio may well turn out to be the grenade in the ebook punchbowl… I’m hoping an Android-native version appears pretty soon.

And what of the humble magazine? Distribution and print costs are killing off all but the most tenacious print publishing niches at a ferocious rate, but there’s plenty of people trying to find a new paradigm for the format – here’s a video demo of Mag+, the result of a collaboration between a Swedish publisher and BERG, the London-based design outfit [via MetaFilter]:

Of course, you may be thinking that all these developments are attempts to saddle a horse that has already fled the stable… after all, no-one reads any more, do they? Well, actually, they do – the consumption patterns and preferred media have changed rapidly, but a recent University of California study shows that the amount of text consumed by the average American has actually tripled since 1980, and social networks like Facebook have ordinary people writing more regularly than ever before (although the quality and nature of the material they write is admittedly pretty variable).

The one thing we can probably say for certain is that people are still going to be reading in 2010, and for a long time afterwards. The challenge for writers and publishers (of fiction or otherwise) are to find the channels that work best for the material they produce, and then to find a way to leverage that channel to make it a viable business model.

Interesting times ahead, don’t you think?