Interaction the way we want it as Humans

I noticed a great post by Christian over on the Cisco virtual world blog about the rise of expectation in new interfaces. I think in nearly every pitch I do towards the end I remind people that we seem to have tied ourselves to keyboards, supposedly to stop typewriters jamming, mice for navigation of 2d windows, and a few other metaphors for interaction that we are now in a position to break away from. I wrote some of this last year in a mini predictions post
One of the things people always seem to say on entering a virtual world (those who are not metarati or gamers) is the fact it is hard to move around. That may not be the case in reality, but just as people struggled with a mouse and menus and windows 15 years ago, they are doing the same with arrow keys, mouselook and the various other convaluted ways we seek to interact with the computer.
Clearly people’s expectation of display devices will be changed by the multitouch iphone, or simple gesture interaction as we see with the wii controller. All that is well trodden technology in some respects now. It has become commercially robust and is now in all our hands to push things forward.
Another exciting development and one I am sure we will cover in a lot more depth in the near future is Emotiv. There is a great BBC article on it here and you will notice a certain company mentioned alongside it and those of you at GDC may well have seen it. A very soon to be available commercial device to detect brain patterns and allow us to interact with the machines in yet another way.
Combine all these with the augmented reality, projection, headset approaches and we have a very rich set of tools to work with to see how we as humans are able to free ourselves from some of the self imposed shackles we have for interaction. Another article here on Kurzweil’s keynote at GDC hints at an even deeper future
Of course, thats not to throw away any of the old ways, we still use command lines where needed, we still use books and print where needed, but having more and richer things more suited to an indivuals neuro linguistic programming stack, or adding in accessibility for all so we can all interact however and wherever regardless of particular limitations can only be a good thing?

14 thoughts on “Interaction the way we want it as Humans

  1. People underestimate the role that Solitaire and Mindsweeper had in training a generation in using the mouse. People always asked “why did they include _games_ in the operating system?” Really, they were just insidious training tools. Someone might be reluctant to work out how to use the mouse deftly and swiftly in their accounting application, but to clear a minefield? Sure!
    I wonder if the recently released OpenSim based IBM Datacenter included something similar for the same reasons. Maybe it should have…

  2. @Jo Interesting point 🙂 It coul dbe that the generation of gamers that many of us are have already learned the skills we need. We now have a set casual gamers understanding the sort of interactions they might expect.
    Of course specific games to lead people in sound like a great idea. The success of the kick around boulder in our internal metaverse shows that play and learning go hand in hand.

  3. Pingback: Moebius » Blog Archive » Interpretando las ondas cerebrales y trasmitiéndolas a la computadora

  4. Very excited by Emotiv – absolutley spot on, the time is ripe for a more intuitive, natural type of input device to control our rich digital collection. Really look forward to seeing this intergrated with software and gaming and in particular navigation and expression in virtual worlds which is still plagued with clumsy, unnatural control – loved the Emotiv demo video on their site http://emotiv.com/corporate, showing off the potential to control avatar camera angles, body language, movement etc. fantastic! Harnessing the power of the mind and body, and the gradual fusion of digital-realworld media makes for some very exciting progress in a booming eCulture =)

  5. Brain control headset for gamers. Se trata de un neuroauricular que “ recoge la actividad eléctrica del cerebro y envía señales inalámbricas a una

  6. Someone might be reluctant to work out how to use the mouse deftly and swiftly in their accounting application, but to clear a minefield? Sure!

  7. If you ever want to hear a reader’s feedback 🙂 , I rate this article for 4/5. Decent info, but I just have to go to that damn yahoo to find the missed parts. Thank you, anyway!

  8. @Jo Interesting point 🙂 It coul dbe that the generation of gamers that many of us are have already learned the skills we need. We now have a set casual gamers understanding the sort of interactions they might expect.
    Of course specific games to lead people in sound like a great idea. The success of the kick around boulder in our internal metaverse shows that play and learning go hand in hand.

  9. Someone might be reluctant to work out how to use the mouse deftly and swiftly in their accounting application, but to clear a minefield? Sure!

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