Mint Usability

The video itself is quite old, circa 2007 (old in internet time and/or in multi-touch time), but I wanted still to post it since it illustrates nicely the way how at the moment multi-touch seems to be more of an evolutionary hit and miss than actually a step forward. The video in question is quite nice project, from couple of students from India, their aim is to create whole new Operating System based on multi-touch. Now, that’s quite a goal, and all the respect for that, but it seems that in the same time it’s also the downfall of the project. At least when looking it from the perspective of usability .

Head on forward for video and more analysis

Continue reading “State of the Union – Multi-touch, Independence Day (the movie) of usability”

Remember the coolness dripping user interface from Minority report? (oh, come on! who doesn’t?) Now the new company called Mgestyk Technologies is poised to take that into consumer reality.

Now, as the you might seen the Johnny Chung Lee Wiimote interpretation, Mgestyk system seems to use the same principle, illuminating the users hands with IR-light. However, they have taken it to new level using something I’d guess is some sorts of blob recoginition, which figures out the orientation of the hands, numbers of fingers etc. This in turn seems to be hooked to something that sends keypress events to the system.

I can see one problem with this type of systems. It’s not analog, like you can see from the driving & the flying games, which is a damn shame. Though this I would presume is could be fixable; just imitate joystic events.

Although I would say that I would be much more interested of applications that would be usable to day-to-day gaminglife. Like, say, driving the car in a game without the actual wheel… it’s nice as a toy but it doesn’t have anything on real-life-psysical-wheel-and-pedals-combo. Sure these kind of applications will find their way to advertising (and to CNN ) and later on to say TV controls but I hardly can see them as the only way of controlling, at least not yet. As an way of enhancing user control on the other hand… In my last article I’ve talked about enhancing natural behaviour and the using it in the world of gaming (posture guided gaming). I would say that “bodygesture based control” work best on the secondary means of control, that overlaps the primary (possibly haptic) means of control, giving the user more precise (and in some cases and natural way of fine tuning things.

Check the video after the break.

Continue reading “Minority Report UI, consumer style”

It seems that the Saturday Night Live agrees with my earlier post (Multitouch is useless, dead) and proceeds to ridicule the awesome benefits of multi-touch that we enjoy today. Check the video from the full post.

Continue reading “Multitouch is dead, SNL agrees”

Ok. I admit you just might have felt up those knobs (umpf) before but I’m betting it wasn’t your laptops screen? Apparently guys at Griton Labs weren’t happy with the current state either, so what they came up with solution called Sense Surface, which basically enables real world(tm) controllers for digital control tables. Apparently you just smack your knob (not that!) to the screen, at the point where your i.e. digital presentation of rotary switch resides and start turning, and lo’ the digital version follows the movements of your knob. (Still, not that! Though, that would make kinda interesting flight simulator solutions..)

Head up to the full post to see the video of them knobs in action.

Griton Laboratorios ltd

Continue reading “3D controls for 2D screen, with tactility you have never seen.. felt before. Or have you?”

As Firefox is heading towards mobile space it’s pretty obvious that the user interface, which is designed for mouse driven computer screens really can’t handle today’s touch-screens and whatnots.

The initial impression is that this really looks nice as far as user interfaces go. However, if you want to go heuristic on this, in the light of usability, the lack of visual clues in the default view might become a problem. However, if proper tutorial/tips are provided this shouldn’t become a problem.

Also I’m not sure if, in the end, I like the drag controls. Sure, it’s nice with such small pages but what if the user navigates to a page which is far wider than the mobile screen can handle? After all, such pages are hardly uncommon in the internet.

Not to mention the user interface has two completely different operations in the same direction drag (drag to right/reveal left – either browser controls or back to all tabs view), only the length of the drag defines what happens. However, with proper execution and clues I think this could be handled;

50% screen (or less) drag/reveal = browser controls
90% screen drag/reveal = back to all tabs view

This way user could rely on muscle memory when using the interface, thus using it faster and more reliable, instead of conclusions based solely on visually observations.

Video after the jump.

Read: Aza Raskin’s blog or Mozilla Labs blog

Continue reading “Firefox mobile gets concept user interface”

HP has realeased this all-new kitchen/media/whatever everything-but-kitchensink computer which you should be able to handle with touch only. That’s touch, as a singular, no multi-touch for this one.

Doesn’t look like surefire to me. Yes, it’s a nice concept and the user interface looks nice. Actually it looks like Windows Media Center with Vista treatment, meaning everything is black. And lots of gloss of course as the trends today dictate.

However, it seems to have usability problems which are bound to cause irritation, like pictures that look like thumbnails that you can open and but, a-ha, you can’t. Touch panel response seems to be another issue. as the device fails to act for every third input, which kinda.. well, sucks.

Though, I must admit, I’m somewhat interested how this will cope up the true world, since I’ve designed, as part of UI design course, somewhat similiar device with touch-only inputs. Maybe I throw in some screenshots of it, at some point. Although, they aren’t too polished, specially when you compare them to device like this. (If I just can find them somewhere, that is. Seem to have misplaced the whole project somewhere.)

Video after the jump, with TouchSmart 2 presentation video, or just head straight to CrunchGear to see more.

Video after the jump.

Read it all from CrunchGear

Continue reading “HP TouchSmart 2 caught on video”

Guess you can soon mention Surface as kind-of real life(tm) application since it’s supposed to land to hotel Rio, Las Vegas, any time now. Though I’m still waiting for the REAL application to really use multi-touch for it’s advantage. And no, I’m not counting Perceptive Pixel’s huge-ass wall.

So, I guess I have to revisit my Multi-touch -article soon. Nah, don’t think so.

Video after the jump

Continue reading “Microsoft Surface hits Las Vegas”