"If our cars were as difficult to drive as our computers are to operate, they would never leave our garage" is the opening gambit by Michael Dertouzos in his book "The Unfinished Revolution". That's fairly true. And a driver of a car can pretty much move from one car to the next and drive that one as well - even when the steering wheel and pedals are on the 'wrong' side of the car.
It obviously took a long time for the steering wheel to become a standard in cars and there have been many attempts to change it (James May of Top Gear blogs about the 'wheel thing'. The steering wheel, because of its link with directing a car and the appropriate level of tactile feedback it provides is exactly the right thing for interfacing with a car. And remember, a car pretty much does one thing as it's a vehicle it moves from one place to the next and you might have to change direction a bit to avoid objects en-route (alternatively you just want to drift around corners at Mach 3).
So Mr Dertouzous' statement will drive most of my further ramblings on these topics. In my first post on this topic I mentioned that using a floppy disk icon for 'Save' could be perceived as being a bit dated. Yet a folder (when was the last time you saw one of those!?) representing 'Open' might not be. The thing is with comparing operating a computer with driving a car is that a computer can do a whole many more differing tasks than a car can. Indeed you can plug a mock up steering wheel into a computer and pretend to drive it.
So what attempts have there been to make operating a computer easier, faster better, or dare I say more natural.
Let's start with Bumptop. A demo of Bumptop was done at TED a few years back. Bumptop takes the desktop metaphor to the next level by fundamentally introducing the notion of three-dimensions and most importantly physics. I signed up for the beta what seems like a billion years ago but nothing has been forthcoming. Bumptop and the similar Real Desktop (which runs as a replacement desktop for Windows) still rely on the mouse / icon interaction method.
The Surface computer from Microsoft and Apple's iPhone remove the mouse as the method of interaction and use something much more natural, namely your hands and fingers. Again, physics engines are applied to add momentum and interactivity. Having been a user of the iPhone from the day of its launch in the UK I was mightily impressed by what Apple have achieved in terms of slickness and responsiveness. To date I've not had chance to have a go with a Surface computer, or the solution from Perceptive Pixel but the speed at which it responds does look very impressive. A demo of a news reader application for the Surface computer recently showed another example of where this type of user interaction adds novelty to the experience.
The combination of multi-touch, big screens and voice recognition has the potential to be awesome. In the Perceptive Pixel demonstration there's a mind-mapping example showing how a map of thoughts can be navigated. If the system could do speech to text I think it would be a fantastic tool for workshops.
So I'm one of the generation of people who grew up and adjusted to Windows and Mac as the primary way we interact with computers. Guaranteed my initial experiences of computers was very different having gone through experiences with Acorn Atom, Vic 20, Commodore 64, Amiga, Acorn Achimedes, IBM PS2 and Opus III to name a few.
But how will today's generation 'learn' computers? I'll move onto that in my next post on his topic.
Posted via email from gazcoop
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