Here are a couple demos from Microsoft Research that I’ve recently discovered that are full of interesting future interaction ideas. The first video asks what we could do with touch-interfaces if we weren’t limited to finger (and multi-finger) input. What if we could use our whole hand? Called Rock & Rails, the technology demo proposes three new gestures types: a fist, the side of your hand extended straight, and the side of your hand curved….
 
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Here’s a charming Augmented Reality vision piece, “Medley,” created by Mattias Wozniak and Björn Svensson as part of their Masters Thesis at Lund University in Sweden. It’s full of great, beautifully delicate, examples how AR could be incorporated into everyday life. A nice contrast to some of the alternative nightmarish advertising or boring corporate scenarios. Medley is based around the notion of “augmented reality visor seamlessly integrated into your world.” With this visor as a…
 
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For Disney’s “TRON: Legacy,” Bradley Munkowitz, better known as GMUNK, was the lead animated graphics artist. He assembled and led a team of GFX all-stars who conceived, designed and animated approximately 10 minutes of UI sequences and holograms at Digital Domain for director Joseph Kosinski and visual effects supervisor Eric Barba. I was so happy that he agreed to do this interview about his involvement in that film. Q: Can you talk a little about…
 
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Space Fence is a $60-million future US space surveillance network — claimed to be able to detect objects as small as 10 cm (four inches) at heights up to 30,000 km (15,000 nautical miles). One of the key contractors, Lockeed Martin, recently posted a video (also on their How website) showing a vision of how the program will revamp the way the U.S. Air Force identifies and tracks objects in space. The film is a…
 
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ImageFlow is a recently published project from Microsoft Research which aims to re-think the nature of image search. Rather than displaying search results in a grid or flat page-like layout, ImageFlow uses a 3D space in which the searcher can explore the content. The project is built upon some fascinating prior research. Specifically, that user intent can be quite different when they’re searching for images rather than text. For example, image search… Can be ‘exploratory’…
 
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Here’s some super-interesting work from the Nokia Research Center showing five future mobile interface ideas. The introduction film is a charming animated scenario called Morph. It demonstrates some possibilities nanotechnologies might enable in future communication devices. But it’s not just dreaming, there’s some pretty hard-core science going on behind the scenes. Much of the vision is based on nanotechnologies and research done with the Cambridge Nanoscience Centre. The applications are pretty cool. They include stretchable…
 
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Check it out, two new films from BERG — what a great way to start the day. They’re sketches exploring ideas and principles behind Dentsu London‘s communications strategy Making Future Magic. The films don’t feature a lot of interactivity, they’re more about communication and information design. But they are quite beautiful, and calm, visions of how technology can be woven into our lives. Russell Davies points out that the films are “a great expression and…
 
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The first time I experienced a haptic interface was back in 1990, when I got a demo of Margaret Minsky’s Sandpaper system at MIT. Using a force-feedback joystick, users could move the screen’s cursor across a textured area and the joystick would simulate the feeling of resistance and surface. It was pretty cool to see how digital space didn’t need to be disconnected from our senses. To this day, however, haptics remain fairly niche. Some…
 
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Look! Look! Look! My friend Keith Knueven has created a new logo for this blog! Take a moment, visit his website TDOOKK.com, and then hire him, immediately, for all your projects — he’s great! Thank you Keith!!! When I started Inventing Interactive, at the beginning of the year, I had no posts planed and no idea of how long I’d do it. It’s hard to believe that, with this, I’ve done 119 posts. It’s been…
 
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When I was a kid I loved watching the 1970′s tv show Space: 1999. For some reason it was only on around 11 or 12 at night, and so I had to stay up late, which gave watching it a kind of other-worldly experience. A few months ago Sean Adams did a great post on the show’s fashions and interiors — and I’ve been meaning, since then, to post something on the show’s computer interactions….
 
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