Following the Interactive conference at Saarbruken Germany

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Fall has come to Virginia painting wonderful colors in the sky and on the mountains. While I have taken the time to enjoy them this year, I have also been very busy looking at upcoming New User Interface advancement both in the areas of computers and gaming technology. I am waiting for my Kinect to arrive. The downside it’s a Christmas present for the family so I’ll have to play with it in secret.

I think that the impact Kinect will have with the computing world will be felt much broadly then just gaming. Motion capture will surely be integrated into the next Windows OS Win8, which will enable it’s use for small gestures and facial recognition as well as large scale manipulation of objects and data like we saw in the movie “Minority Report”. Microsoft Research is already working with this technology in the lab in the form of prototypes. It’s important to keep in mind though that these advancements take time. I’ve followed two Microsoft Research projects from just research to full production models. Microsoft Surface (then Vienna) was the first and Kinect (then Nadal) was the second. Before we can use new interfaces we have to understand how people are going to react to working with computers in a more natural way. There is just as much psychology about future tech as there is technology .

Believe it or not people I have talked to feel that using fingers, hands and full body movements to interact with computers are un-natural . They tell me that working with a mouse is natural. My response? That to your hands that are tingling because of the un-natural way you have to hold them in order to use the mouse and track pad. After only a week I found that I can’t work on a computer as well WITHOUT a touchscreen. But there is still a lot of research needing to be done on how to set up NUI based screens and computers that will allow a shallow learning curve and ease the fears of users. That is what a lot of the papers presented at ITS 2010 in Germany this week. What is the best design for an interactive application? How do people interact with a large interactive table, or surface? How do they want to learn about HOW to interact with the interactive surface or device? If your interested surf over to the ITS 2010 web page for the papers concerning design and implementation of interactive tables and surfaces.

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