Prototype Real / Digital Info Interface System

Prototype Real / Digital Info Interface System

Using projection and gestures to create interactive relationship with information - video embedded below:

Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a next generation user interface which can accurately detect the users finger and what it is touching, creating an interactive touchscreen-like system, using objects in the real word.

"We think paper and many other objects could be manipulated by touching them, as with a touchscreen. This system doesn’t use any special hardware; it consists of just a device like an ordinary webcam, plus a commercial projector. Its capabilities are achieved by image processing technology."

Using this technology, information can be imported from a document as data, by selecting the necessary parts with your finger.

More at DigInfo here

RELATED: This is very similar to a concept developed in 1991 called ‘The Digital Desk’ [link]

Source: diginfo.tv

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Will the future of UI design turn us all into cyborgs?

For an adult with no prior exposure or experience, learning how to use a desktop computer can be a confusing challenge.

The desktop computing experience is neither intuitive nor innate to human beings – it requires significant training, time, and ideally early-age immersion in order to understand the paradigms of computing (both understanding how to physically interact, as well as conceptually understand virtual computing environments).

Since the adoption of the personal desktop computer in the 1980s, our efforts to naturalize the personal computing experience has been limited to humans as the variable factor when adapting to computing environments. It’s amazing that we have managed to retain the paradigms of how to sit at a computer since the early 80s – with desktop computing today resembling the exact same monitor/keyboard/mouse setup – with little physical interactive variation.

To illustrate how unnatural and unintuitive this archaic experience is, imagine the learning curve that a first-time user in their 50s experiences in order to understand this interface paradigm. There really is nothing fundamentally “natural” about the desktop computing experience – if anything, it is the furthest thing away from being a natural human function.

We are living in a fascinating time – it is only recently that we are finally breaking the paradigms of our traditional interface constraints set by the 80s. We are finally seeing new forms of portable computing devices – multitouch surfaces, powerful and lightweight mobile devices, and now the emerging market of wearable technology. We are entering an exciting world outside the constraints of physical and virtual environments.

It’s about time we return to our natural world.

The history of the user interface

A quick history lesson: computers, up until the mid 70s, were not much more than large glorified calculators. It was in the late 70s and early 80s when personal computing took a drastic leap forward: moving from command line interfaces (CLI), where typing was the primary communication with computing technology, to the graphical user interface (GUI), which was a more natural and emotionally compelling way to interact with a computer.

This made personal computing dramatically more accessible to average folk – giving people the ability to “see” into the computer world, creating virtual environments and live visual feedback, pushing us one step closer to a more human-like computing environment.

But there’s something odd here – in the 30 years since the release of the Apple Lisa (the first personal computer to offer a GUI in an inexpensive machine), little has changed regarding the physical experience when interacting with personal computers. Sure we invented the Internet, progressed from the first iteration of HTML to HTML 5, and developed transformative Web platforms to connect everyone – but our rigid adherence to the monitor/keyboard/mouse legacy kept our physical desktop experience the same in the early 2010s as it was in the early 1980s.

To further support how far we’ve deviated from the natural world, the study of ergonomics emerged as a way to save our bodies from injury as we try to adapt them to this unnatural environment.

The future of UI: Returning to nature

Flash forward to the late 2000s – or as Apple describes it, the “Post-PC era.” The introduction of widespread multi-touch and mobile computing marks the largest leap forward yet in human-computer interfaces. Mobile devices are designed to be lightweight, portable, and seamless with one’s everyday lifestyle. Suddenly, we’re in the middle of one of the most important technological revolutions, when our computing devices begin to adapt to our natural human function.

The first step into this realm has been the wide adoption of smartphone mobile technology – where checking your schedule is as easy as pulling out a piece of paper with your day plans scribbled on it. Knowing where to go (regardless of how bad your sense of direction) is again as easy as pulling out paper with directions written down. Knowledge appears as you pull out your phone for answers.

We are only beginning to discover the possibilities of a world where devices adapt to our natural human behaviors; a stark departure from “human-computing,” where technology supports and amplifies natural human function.

3 Components of natural user interfaces

In the next wave of this revolution, hardware will virtually disappear.

Take Google Glass as an example. The intention of Google Glass is to liberate us from needing to compute within the universe of a personal computer, by having an unobtrusive overlay to our natural sight and vision. This is computing as a support to our natural human functions, and is an example of Invisible Computing, one of three natural user interfaces.

1. Invisible Computing
   Invisible computing is when hardware virtually disappears, as computing technology unobtrusively integrates with everyday, natural human function.
2. Supportive Computing
   Supportive computing is computing technology that supports natural human function, rather than requires humans to adapt to computing functions.
3. Adaptive Computing
   Adaptive computing and machine learning intelligently recognize and interpret human patterns to produce output based on relative context.

An example of a technology that has matured over time, is optics and optometry. Just think about corrective lenses: in the case of contact lenses, we place a thin film directly on our cornea, thereby altering light rays to converge absolutely perfectly onto our retina. Suddenly, with very little effort, we have perfect vision.

We tend to forget how phenomenal corrective lenses are due to their seamless integration into our everyday lifestyles and routine. To reflect on our current state of computing: imagine if in order to correct your vision, you required a keyboard and mouse to toggle your vision every time you needed to focus.

Mature technological applications seamlessly disappear as they integrate into our lives.

What does this mean for UX/UI designers?

As computing technology advances, it pushes us UX/UI designers to constantly be on our toes while adapting accordingly. But as any UX/UI designer will tell you, in order to become a leader in the industry we must discuss and evaluate technological trends in order to effectively evolve with the exponential growth and changes within the industry.

To put into context: UX/UI has seen unprecedented growth as an industry in the past few years. This is the result of designers adapting to technological developments – and as we are introduced to new challenges ahead, we will think about natural human experiences beyond the everyday screen.

Perhaps one day the screen will no longer be relevant. Perhaps one day we will adopt a human-centric interface that can’t be mocked up in Photoshop. But when that day comes, we’ll be ready to meet new challenges – envisioning and designing for the future of technology.

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11 Exciting UI and UX Ideas of 2013

Much has changed in our world in the past decade. Remember 2003? 50 Cent was still on top, as was Dubya, and you were hot shit if your cellphone had a color screen. Imagine knowing that in ten years, we’d interact with tech using our voices, our gestures, and even our brainwaves. 2013, in particular, has been a year of change.

2013 saw a decrease in the all-encompassing importance of the smartphone, and the rise of devices that don’t even necessarily depend on a screen: From the advent of truly useful voice-controlled technology to devices that we control with the flick of a wrist. This year, devices broke free of the palm-held model, coming in all shapes and sizes: From city-scale systems, to wearable tech, to networks that are all but invisible. And most importantly, we’ve seen more and more average, untrained enthusiasts experimenting with building their own software and devices—a trend that bodes well for 2014.

The highlights follow—and be sure to ruminate with us on what the next decade will bring in the comments.

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Down With Hardware

Google’s Chromebook Pixel is aspirational in nearly every way. It’s designed within an inch of its life, a physical specimen worthy of… Read…

If there was one overriding trend for mobile devices this year, it was probably thedecreasing importance of the device itself—and the rise of software in its place. From the hubbub surrounding flat design within the ranks of Google and Apple, to the introduction of the first iOS overhaul in nearly a decade, software became the most important vessel for the consumer experiences this year—overshadowing even the unveiling of new phones. As Brian Barrett suggested, “Consumer technology has reached a point wherehardware comes last in the decision tree.”

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Hiroshi Ishii’s Magical, Tangible Interfaces

Ishii, the director of MIT’s Tangible Media Group, is riding the crest of a new wave of experimental interfaces that bridge the gap between the screen and the physical world. These are interfaces that are truly tactile and tangible—they rely on our sense of touch rather than sight or sound. The prototype above, by student Keiichi Matsuda, hit the web just a few weeks ago. As Jesus Diaz wrote, “it reproduces a virtual version of anything that you put under its sensors—in realtime.”

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The Heads-Up Home

So far most of what’s been written about Google Glass has been united by one commonality: It’s been written from the perspective of someone … Read…

2013 saw the HUD, or heads-up display, winding its way into the mainstream of consumer electronics. One big entree was Nest’s second product, Protect, a fire alarm that lets users “wave away” warning messages and responds to movement. The trend also came to the roads, the slopes, and, yes, fine, more of our faces, too.

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Put a Circuit On It

Some of the most exciting projects of the year were also the simplest—starting with the use of conductive ink and paint. Take, for example, a vase whose geometric patterns are actually a set of tactile controls, above. Or a speaker simple enough to be mounted on a piece of paper, with the circuitry actually silk-screened on using conductive ink.

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The Car Smartens Up (Finally)

The auto industry has been slow to come around to the idea of connected cars—despite the fact that GPS and texting are now indispensable to many drivers (for better or worse). This year, we saw that begin to change: From the implementation of a federal study on connected vehiclesthat kicked off in January, to the introduction of the first “smart” highway in the UK, to consumer products like Automatic, a hardware app that improves the driving experience. Designers are even mulling how to stop people from texting while in the driver’s seat—see, for example, this proposal for a “car mode" similar to the "plane mode" in iOS.

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Old Media Iterates

This year we saw print publishing trying out new ideas in rounds of iteration. The most notable,The New York Times, tinkered significantly with its layout while introducing a clean new web app, Today’s Paper, just this month. The New Yorker also introduced its first design changes in 13 years, redrawing its typeface and making layout changes that improve how it treats photography and art. In the past, major changes like these have been fewer and further in between—so it’s nice to see traditional publications adopting ideas from the new media world.

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Gesture Control For Doctors

Sure, Elon Musk and Tony Stark might make gesture-based interfaces look cool, but systems like Leap Motion also show promise in other, more unexpected fields—including medicine. From using it to access information during a complex surgery to modeling molecular structures, it’s an interesting outgrowth of a technology originally intended for gamers, not doctors.

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The End of Thumbs Up

As Facebook has expanded into new cultures and demographics, the UI that made it famous has often seemed archaic compared to the emerging use cases for its user base. There was probably no bigger indication of that than the company’s decision to quietly phase out the “thumbs up” button this year—after all, thumbs up definitely doesn’t mean the same thing in every country.

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Kitchen-Sized Computers

Computers started off as room-sized, and now they’re room-sized again—but for an entirely different reason. Frog’s Jared Ficklin introduced the remarkable RoomE prototype earlier this year: The voice- and gesture-controlled system connects a home’s lights, computers, and physical objects, creating a more ambient and responsive home computing system. “It has the potential to be more heads-up, allowing users to be present in their environment,” Ficklin says. “Eventually, room-size computing will touch everything.”

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Responsive Garments

From dresses that respond to direct eye contact to jackets embedded with photovoltaics that can charge electronic devices, 2013 was a year of smart clothing. These projects—while mostly speculative—give us a glimpse at the future of wearable tech that goes beyond watches and wristbands.

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Xbox One’s Voice Control

A major point of contention in this year’s big Xbox One release was the “always on” listening feature, which hit the market during a time when privacy concerns were tantamount to many users. Despite those fears, the One’s voice recognition system is a huge step forward for the genre, and hints at how ubiquitous voice control could eventually become. “Kinect voice recognition is freaking fantastic. Like, sit-in-stunned-amazement-barking-commands-and-pausing-to-squeal-with-glee fantastic,” said Eric Limer in his review. “There is hardly anything you can’t do on the Xbox One using voice commands.”

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Did UX Kill Branding?

In the age of User Experience, what is branding? Is a brand just a logo, or is it more than that? Does the word brand even mean anything anymore?

To answer these questions, let’s take a quick look at the history of branding.

The Ancient Art of Branding

We often think of branding as a recent phenomenon, but it’s not.

No animals were harmed in the Photoshopping of this image.

The original brand was a reference to the physical branding of cattle and livestock, dating back to 2,000 BC.

Since then, anything and everything has been branded. Bread makers, goldsmiths and silversmiths have placed their brand marks on goods in England as early as the 1200s. Printers used watermarks to brand their paper. Even criminals and slaves have been branded, rather cruelly.

Early companies that sold medicine and tobacco began to brand their products in the early 1800s. Proctor and Gamble, and other large consumer goods businesses, followed suit in the same century.

Branding, at least as we once knew it, exploded during the industrial revolution. By this time, brands were in their infancy. A brand was really just a logo, and a way to introduce mass-produced stuff to the world.

After World War II, consumerism stepped up a notch with heightened consumer choice increasing the need for product differentiation. Branding was no longer just a logo. The brand became the communication of a product’s features and benefits, and its emotional connection with consumers. The physical packaging of a product became part of the brand, too.

Branding was a cornerstone of the Advertising and Marketing arena, all the way up to the 90s. The Brand Manager, usually a marketing type, was the chief steward of the brand. Brands advertised to consumers, using really big advertising budgets. Consumers would buy said brands. They called it the TV-Industrial complex.

Until this point, a brand was essentially a one-way dialogue from producer to consumer. Then the Internet turned up. And things changed.

What does branding mean today?

In a post cluetrain world, marketers were forced, rather abruptly, to change. Marketing became two-way, and brands were forced to deal with the brave new world of the Internet. The old way of marketing felt a bit dirty, so the marketing profession went through an identity crisis.

As a result, there’s still quite a lot of some confusion as to what branding actually means in the Tenties.

There isn’t one standard definition of branding anymore. Here are a couple:

Our brand will only ever be the memory of the experience our people had when interacting with us.

—Startup Blog

Brand is a stand-in, a euphemism, a shortcut for a whole bunch of expectations, worldview connections, experiences, and promises that a product or service makes, and these allow us to work our way through a world that has thirty thousand brands that we have to make decisions about every day.

—Seth Godin

In both these definitions, the brand is certainly no longer just about the visual cues. It’s every cue that your customer has about you. The one word that these definitions both have in common—theexperience.

Ask many UXers, and they’d probably tell you that they work on experiences, not brands. They’d say that branding is what’s done by branding agencies—the logo, typefaces and a style guide.

Many businesses still assume, incorrectly, that a new brand identity can fix their woes. Slap on a new logo with a fancy new font and colour scheme and your customers will forget every single bad interaction they’ve had with your organisation. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

Organisations need to fix the experience that people are having with the brand.

As experience designers, we understand the need to improve every touchpoint, across every channel. It’s not until we’re satisfied with each improvement that we should we think about rolling out a new logo, or brand identity.

You also hear a lot less about the traditional brand elements of Price, Product, Place and Promotion. Instead, there’s talk of Impression, Interaction, Responsiveness and Resilience:

• Impression—what does the brand say to me about me?
• Interaction—does the brand do what it promises to do?
• Responsiveness—does the brand respond to my needs?
• Resilience—does this brand cares about our future?

[Source: The four elements of a great brand experience]

But is this branding? Or is it experience design?

Truth is, it’s a bit of both.

The online experience

When we design an online experience, we need to consider total impression, made up of every single online touchpoint:

• The user interface, defined by the UI Design (and front-end code)
• The colours, images, typography, and other visual elements
• The usability, across all devices and platforms
• The interaction design, transitions and animation
• The content strategy touchpoints (email notifications, social media prescence)
• The tone of voice and personality evident in copy, customer support and error messaging
• The performance. Slow, error prone websites can really an online brand experience
• The micro interactions, or moments of delight

The delivery of great online brands may feel like a happy accident. But more often that not, it’s the hard efforts of a strong UX team.

A great example of this is Mailchimp. Their delightful online experience has been well orchestrated by their award-winning UX team. Using design patterns, style guides and voice and tone guidelines, Mailchimp is an online brand done well.

Marketers are still involved in the process but in most cases; it’s the UX team that best influences the online experience. This, in turn, influences the brand experience.

The multi-channel experience

So far, we’ve talked mostly about online. Things get a little more complicated when you consider that most brands aren’t exclusively on the web.

Almost every product or service exists both online and offline, with a combination of digital and offline touch points. Most brands are cross-channel in some way.

We’ve seen a rise in Service Design and Customer Experience (CX) to deal with this. User-centred service design is still a new area, but we all understand the need to identify, research, and evaluate the customer and their journey.

UX and CX designers strive to create flawlessly delightful experiences, regardless of the channel. And if done well, the total experience can make you fall in love with a brand.

Here’s a recent example from Photojojo, an online camera store. It’s a simple and fun website, full of personality. Photojojo are often praised for their web experience.

This Christmas, they’ve added a brilliant little micro-interaction to their service—a cookie scent to their packages. It’s a fun idea that creates a positive brand experience, not only at the online point of purchase, but in the final offline delivery.

Customers love the Photojojo brand, because the experience is so good.

No doubt there’s been a UX designer involved along the way.

Brand is just another way to say Experience.

So what does all this mean for branding? And where does it leave the marketing department?

The Brand is alive and well. It’s just that we use the term less frequently.

The brand isn’t just the logo. The brand is the sum of the entire experience. That’s why branding and experience design are indistinguishable, in many ways.

Like it or not, there’s not much difference between UX designers and marketers either. We’re both interested in our customers. We’re both fascinated about analytics and conversion data. We’re both keen to learn, test and iterate to get to the best result.

Whether you’re an information architect, a content strategist, a UX or UI designer, a developer, or even a marketer, you’re probably passionate about designing the experience, and influencing the brand.

We’re all marketers now.

User experience didn’t kill branding. User experience is the branding.

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10 Stunning Art Installations in 2013

Out of all the different types of art forms we write about on a daily basis, there’s one that clearly stands apart from the rest - installation. According to Merriam-Webster, an installation is defined as “a work of art that usually consists of multiple components often in mixed media and that is exhibited in a usually large space in an arrangement specified by the artist.”

Why do we love installation art? For many reasons. First, it’s oftentimes immersive, providing visitors with a multi-sensory experience. Next, it’s site-specific, meaning that piece of art was built for that particular time and space. Finally, it’s highly imaginative in that it brings several different materials together to create something original and unexpected.

Today, we take a look at the most stunning installations that were shown around the world in 2013. If you were one of the lucky ones, you experienced one or a few of these artworks first-hand yourself.

10. Colorful Canopies of Umbrellas by Sextafeira Produções

In July, the city of Agueda, Portugal came alive as a colorful canopies of umbrellas hung over its streets. Photographer Patrícia Almeida took great shots of a similar installation last year, which went viral. This was part of an art festival called Agitagueda. Production company Sextafeira Produções had created the cheery installation to turn traditional shopping streets into an engaging visual experience. See more, here.

9. From the Knees of My Nose to the Belly of My Toes by Alex Chinneck

From the Knees of My Nose to the Belly of My Toes is a surreal display by British designer Alex Chinneck that makes it look like the brick facade is sliding right off the front of a building in Margate, England. The eye-catching installation, which took Chinneck approximately one year to bring to fruition, took a four-story residence that had been abandoned for eleven years and replaced the old frontage with a new one that slumped down and curved outward. See more, here.

8. The Fallen by Andy Moss and Jamie Wardley

British artists Andy Moss and Jamie Wardley, of Sand In Your Eye, produced this incredibly powerful visual display at the D-Day landing beach of Arromanche in France. The two developed this concept, entitled The Fallen, in honor of International Peace Day (September 21) and as a way to remember what happens in the absence of that peace. See more, here.

7. Unwoven Light by Soo Sunny Park

At the Rice University Art Gallery at Houston, Texas, visitors were immersed in a shimmering world of light, shadow and color. Called Unwoven Light, the hovering sculpture, by artist Soo Sunny Park, was made of chain link fencing and Plexiglas. Visitors were invited to enter the space to see how natural and artificial light change when viewed at a certain angle or at different times of the day. See more, here.

6. Sirens of the Lambs by Banksy

Leave it to Banksy to mix the cute and the cuddly with the totally disturbing. In the 11th work of his Better Out Than In exhibit that happened on the streets of New York, the British artist took over a delivery truck turning it into a slaughterhouse installation carrying 60 stuffed animals (or puppets) - cows, chickens, pigs, lambs - who were seen moving their heads through wooden slats. See more, here.

5. Home Within Home Within Home Within Home Within Home by Do Ho Suh

At the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Seoul, you could find Home Within Home Within Home Within Home Within Home, a 1:1 scale replica of two houses the artist had previously lived in, one inside the other. Created in purple fabric, his traditional Korean home, where he lived in when he was a child, was enveloped and suspended within a more modern building, his first apartment building when he came to the United States, located in Providence, Rhode Island. See more, here.

4. In Orbit by Tomas Saraceno

His largest and most ambitious work to date, In Orbit by Argentinian artist Tomas Saraceno was a huge mesh construction that suspended over 25 meters above the piazza of the K21 Standehaus museum in Dusseldorf, Germany. Visitors were able to climb on the gigantic steel wire construction that spanned three levels. The mesh net alone weighed three tons and there were a half a dozen “spheres” or inflated PVC balloons positioned within it. See more, here.

3. Forever Bicycles by Ai Weiwei

This year, Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei presented a new version of his incredible Forever Bicycles installation in Toronto. As the centerpiece of this year’s Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, the all-night contemporary art event that takes over city streets, 3,144 bicycles, the most Weiwei has used of this work to date, were stacked 100 feet in length and 30 feet in height and depth in Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square. See more, here.

2. Rain Room by Random International

Rain Room, by London and Berlin-based collective Random International, allowed you to experience the rain without getting wet! First shown at Barbican Centre from October 2012 to this March, it came to New York, housed in a temporary gallery next door to the MoMA museum. This was the monumental installation’s US debut. See more, here.

1. Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away by Yayoi Kusama

In Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, hundreds of multicolored LED lights, suspended at different heights and dangling from floor to ceiling, transformed a room into what feels like eternity. The cube-shaped, mirror-paneled room had a shallow reflecting pool as its floor and the lights flickered on and off in a strobe-like effect. Though similar to the ones Yayoi Kusama has shown previously - Infinity Mirror Room at the Tate Modern and Fireflies on the Water at the Whitney Museum of Art - this one was made especially for the exhibition at David Zwirner gallery and still promised the viewer a wonderfully surreal experience. See more, here.

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Geometric Coin Sculptures

Artist Robert Wechsler (previously) was recently comissioned by the The New Yorker to create a series of coin sculptures for their October 14th money-themed edition. Wechsler used a jeweler’s saw to cut precise notches in coins from various currencies and then joined them together in several geometric forms. While nine pieces were selected for the magazine, a total of 22 were created, all of which can be seen in his Money gallery. (viaColossal Submissions)

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Hand-Painted Letterform Demonstration

Self-taught artist Glen Weisgerber is a master pinstriper who has been in business since the early 1970s painting all matter of truck lettering, race cars, logo designs, guitars and bike customizations. This summer Airbrush Action Magazine filmed Weisgerber doing a number of different hand lettering tutorials including single stroke lettering, and chrome lettering. It’s almost a miracle to see each letterform leave his paintbrush so fully formed and perfect. If I was asked to make a list of 100 guesses of what this man was about to demonstrate based on his looks alone, I don’t think pinstriping would have crossed my mind. Source

Small cubes that self-assemble. Known as M-Blocks, the robots are cubes with no external moving parts. Nonetheless, they’re able to climb over and around one another, leap through the air, roll across the ground, and even move while suspended upside down from metallic surfaces.

Inside each M-Block is a flywheel that can reach speeds of 20,000 revolutions per minute; when the flywheel is braked, it imparts its angular momentum to the cube. On each edge of an M-Block, and on every face, are cleverly arranged permanent magnets that allow any two cubes to attach to each other. Source