SXSW Live: Beyond the Desktop
We are entering a world where controlling a computer goes beyond a keyboard and mouse. The Wii, iPhone, iPad, bluetooth, wi-fi, microsoft surface, multitouch. The computing paradigms are changing.
We’re looking at clips of Iron Man and Minority report of future computing systems and interfaces.
Topics around: being human, casual computing, gesture, physicality, sociality.
Michaelle Perras focuses on mobile application development. She comes from industrial design background, and brings those interaction paradigms to mobile. Industrial / mechanical technology tools are very linear, and have a distinct outcome.
With the shift to post-industrial technology, the tools are multi-purpose, and process driven instead of outcome driven. The problem is that making the shift requires legacy. Which is good to inform new design but is also a restraint to completely freely designing appropriately.
There are industrial archetypes and behavioral archetypes that are upset with new advances in technological affordances. These ultimately inform what technology can really do.
Mobile is a way to instrument the world –Eric Schmidt, Google
Going forward, what are the paradigms that we’re just seeing emerge? Where’s it going in terms of core behavioral archetypes? What will it return to us?
Emotional interactions
Aesthetics
Physical
Participatory
Intentional
Moody works with Stimulant. They do a lot of custom hardware and surface work. Multi-touch and surface apps that are for efficiency, fun, and complex group interaction methods for complex decisionmaking flows.
Many of their installations also happen in public places, so they end up doing a lot of stuff around casual interaction forms, and how to create a certain privacy with systems in a public place.
This is ahead of the curve, and sometimes, using a system that is completely physical is better, sometimes worse than using a keyboard and mouse. But this will only continue to change.
David Merrill is at sifteo, talking about how people have gathered around physical games for thousands of years. Distributed cognition is built around physical objects. In one experiment, people had to make words out of a series of scrabble tiles — with only one group allowed to touch the tiles. Of course the group allowed to touch the tiles did better. We learn more effectively, and solve problems better when we can touch objects.
If we were playing video games right now, we either look at one big screen together, or we’re all using our own monitors. We haven’t figured out a way to do this face to face. He’s been working on siftables, which combines small interfaces into small tiles that you can play with. There’s also going to be an API — watch these products. These things are really cool.
Johnny Lee is already known through his wii hacks videos, byt now he works for Microsoft. He says we’re already mostly past the desktop. Our computational resources are huge, but our capacity of people to manage all this info hasn’t changed very much. Right now, the interface is dominating how much dedication it has inside the machine. the CPU is a very small part. So now instead of making computers really cheap, we can get a whole range of devices.
So the mouse and keyboard isn’t going away, but it’s less applicable in these other domains. Multi-person touch, speech, gesture interaction. Coming up are camera, facial, and body tracking. Head-mounted displays, like glasses, are getting better. University is putting together interfaces on contacts, also body-based computational devices. It’s about capturing intent. But that doesn’t come for free.
Some people think it’s just the hardware, but it’s not. It’s also about the software, the context, and the overall user experience.
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