There’s something a little amazing that happens every time you set up a video projector. All the cables get connected, you turn the projector on, and during the process of placing it, the image may show up on an unexpected surface. It’s cool, so you move the projector around to see what it looks like in other places. For example, at home, we often watch movies outside on a screen, but have tried projecting onto…
 
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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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Distance Lab was a Scottish creative research organization, created with the goal of “bringing together digital media technology, design and the arts to redefine and overcome the disadvantages of distance in learning, health care, relationships, culture and other domains.” Unfortunately, the BBC reports that they have recently closed down. Two of their most publicized projects were Mutsugoto, first shown in 2007, and Remote Impact, first shown in 2008. Mutsugoto was a surprisingly intimate project, intended…
 
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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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The use of technology, especially mobile phones, in poor and developing countries presents huge opportunities for designers. Mobile banking and microfinancing, as just two examples, can help the poor and unbanked with financial services and business support. But it was only after seeing the work by Indrani Medhi that it I grasped one of the deepest underlying design challenges: many of these people are illiterate. In fact there are over two billion people, worldwide, who…
 
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Using a timeline slider to scroll through video to find the moment when an object is at a specific position is awkward and never very precise. Dragon, a project from the Media Computing Group at RWTH Aachen University, looks like a very cool solution. Dragon lets you directly manipulate objects in a video. With the system, you can touch any object in the video and drag it. You can only move them along the path…
 
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This week, here in LA, was SIGRRAPH 2010 — the annual conference on computer graphics and interactive technologies. The two parts of the event I find most interesting are the emerging technologies and art gallery exhibitions — and there was a lot of thought-provoking stuff being shown. Most was a bit rough around the edges, or research without a clear purpose yet, but it was inspirational. And it’s great to see designers, researchers and technologists…
 
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Check out this interesting video from Microsoft Research on using a pen and touch together in an interface. It’s part of Microsoft Research’s Manual Deskterity project. Running on Microsoft Surface, the demo has some really cool examples of how a specific pointing device can be combined with the more general input of touch. Using the pen to write, to peel copies, as an exacto knife, a straight edge, and lots more. At some point the…
 
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It’s kinda crazy – but kinda cool, too. The premise: as technology gets smaller and smaller it gets harder for us to interact with the devices. The solution: use our bodies as input devices! Chris Harrison’s research project, Skinput, to be published at CHI 2010, is fascinating. It’s fun to imagine what this might be like in a few years as technology advances, maybe combined with some sort of augmented reality tech… (Source ignore the…
 
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