Interaction design

For some people counts; the crazier the better. See in this video how the bride uses an interactive floor. [Continue reading...]

Microsoft launched their vision for productivity in the future. When I saw the video for the first time I wondered whether this is stupidity or a imaginable outcome of the next ten years? Some reflections… [Continue reading...]

I read many reviews about the book ‘designing for interaction’ of Dan Saffer so I had high expectations of reading the book. Here I will share my opinions after reading the book.

Dan Saffer has tried to give an overview of interaction design in which he partly succeeded. He describes what interaction design is about and introduces some design basics, research and typical interaction design methods such as personas, storyboards or use cases. The advantage of the book is that it gives an overview of what interaction design is about, but unfortunately always stays on a superficial level. Other authors have written books and books about personas while Dan Saffer does it in five pages. This is my main negative point, because Dan Saffer created overview he also lost focus, don’t expect to be able to put methods or tools in the book into practice. For that everything has been described in a too general level. [Continue reading...]

The company ‘Oblong’ has develop the ‘g-speak’ a way of interaction with gloves in a ‘minority report’ style. So why is this new? The technology uses two gloves that not only read spatial movement from left to right like Softkinetic but also from front to back. This allows you to manipulate or control objects in a much richer way.

Selecting an object can be done for instance by closing the hand palm; grabbing an object, just like in the real world. Now you start to realize how unnatural the whole idea of a mouse is. By moving your hand forward or backwards you can for instance zoom in and out of a picture. This way of interacting gives people the possibility to select and manipulate objects in all three axis. [Continue reading...]

A revolutionary way of creating messages is called Swype. The company founders Cliff Kushler and Randy Marsden with their team have developed a system that recognizes words when you slide over the qwerty keyboard with your fingers. Instead of typing the words, like hardware keyboards this is a touch screen. When you want to write a word you simply connect the dots and the program will recognize the word.

QWERTY history

This reminds us about the QWERTY keyboard history. Originally Christopher Sholes developed another keboard layout for the first type writers. He had problems with the first designs however; typists were so fast that the key got stuck into each other, causing a jam. The solution was simple but with great consequences; reorder the layout in a less logical way to keep typists from typing too fast. Other systems such as the ‘Dvorak keyboard’ can type around 400 of the most common words in English without leaving the middle row while the QWERTY keyboard can only reach up till 100. Another statistic; the middle row of the Dvorak system do 70% of the work while QWERTY only does 32%. [Continue reading...]

James Patten and Ben Recht have developed the Audiopad, a multi touch screen that transforms motion into music. On the touch screen different parameters can be controlled be by dragging and resizing which directly influence the music you hear.

With traditional DJ sets and mixers the feedback is purely led lights that switch on or off while the audiopad also gives visual feedback on the touch screen. In our opinion this makes mixing / creating music is more intuitive as you don’t only have audible feedback but also visual feedback.

How does it work? (from the audiopad site)

Audiopad has a matrix of antenna elements which track the positions of electronically tagged objects on a tabletop surface. Software translates the position information into music and graphical feedback on the tabletop. Each object represents either a musical track or a microphone.

[Continue reading...]

‘Unpressable buttons‘ has written a nice post about sound design in products. There are numerous examples where companies spend tons of money just to get the sound right. Volvo is known for testing endlessly just to get the typical Volvo sound for closing the door. A second example are the coffee machines that use beans. Nowadays the beans can be grind without any noise but that coffee machine would not sell at all. The customer wants to hear heas beans being grinded; it is part of the coffee brewing experience.

Unpressable buttons use the example of artificially created shutter sound of a pocket sized digital camera which you still have with modern SLR’s.These camera’s work so silent that they use this sound for either enhancing the user experience or (more importantly) to give audible feedback to the user about the status of the product. [Continue reading...]

The Microft surface table is introduced in the Shariton hotels. Earlier we wrote about the unveiling of the new surface table and the introduction at AT&T. As with the surface tables at AT&T the ones for the Shariton are specially programmed for this hotel chain. But the working principle remains the same: navigating through the menu by touch or multi touch. [Continue reading...]

The people at MIT have developed a brush that allows you to brush whatever it can see. The brush scans the surface of an object by putting the brush on the object. The brush turns this scan into a texture which can be used to brush on a wall.

But not only can the brush use stills for brushing it can also capture movements of the object that is being scanned. Likely with a camera this is captured and after brushing this texture the movement stays alive and is displayed on the wall as well. In the video one example is shown of capturing ‘blinking eyes’ which are then brushed on the wall. Also on the wall the eyes keep blinking, that is cool! [Continue reading...]