March 13, 2011

Invisible user interface

Researchers experimented with drawing user interfaces in the air. The neat thing is that you can’t see this interface! You have to be aware of it by using your visual memory.

That sound’s very interesting for the scenario in the video to give driving directions. If you don’ have to be accurate in giving visual informations / drawing you don’t have to carry a inconvenient things like a cumbersome note pad with pen.

And if this augmented reality (AR) technology is decreasing itself in size and weight you probably would use the combination of AR-glasses with the ‘freehand drawing’ to be able to draw and see what you are drawing, everywhere. Than one is also able to draw in more than one planes – that’s (approximately) 3 dimensional!

[hpi.uni-potsdam.de: Imaginary Interfaces]

January 21, 2011

Human-car interface

Ford (in co-operation with Microsoft) provides an interesting human-machine interface for their cars called Ford SYNC. The driver mostly controls this interface with his voice (apparently except the volume level) and with that he is able to call people from (connected smart)phone book, get through radio news, be led to a unknown business location and so on.

Ford doesn’t have a lot of visual output of navigational data nor tactile interface. And I think that’s because they don’t want to distract the driver in such way. But so they have to do a lot of communication processes in an auditive way and the driver has to remember many things (menu options, etc.). Thinking about his options is mentally demanding and this is also distracting the driver from the traffic, from my point of view. That’s also the case if the driver lets read out the options by the ‘car’ because he has to focus to that.

I don’t like this interface really well. In my view the perfect interface is multimodal and therefore balanced with more visual and also tactile elements.

[ford.com: Ford SYNC]

PS: Why the most of auditive machine outputs are female?

September 19, 2010

Automatically catch thoughts

This video shows the today’s circumstances to use a BCI (brain computer interface). You need a lot of tools and time to gather simple text messages.

But it’s impressive and I’m sure something like this is the human machine interface of the future! Maybe I saw to many films like “Matrix” and so on but seriously: The brain is the only body part we all have! So in fact e.g. deaf people will be able to speak. Maybe we can make an advance in communicating with sick people, think of paraplegic people or people in coma. Perhaps we will be able to communicate in some way with animals!

[engr.wisc.edu…: Department of Biomedical Engineering]