Don’t get me wrong. I love my current gig. I’ve got a team of A-players and utility infielders that anyone would be envious of. But if I were to move on at some point, it would have to be for a role that deals with the next generation of User Interface (UI) methods and techniques. For now, that would most likely be in the video game industry. With the overwhelming success of Nintendo’s Wii, a whole new set of UI possibilities entered the consumer electronics market (also known as “your living room”). If you haven’t heard about the Wii, you shouldn’t be able to surf the Internet, much less operate a computer….so I’m going to assume you already know that the Wii allows you to play games by using a fairly simple positioning device (the Wii-mote…..clever, huh?) and an infrared bar that sits atop your boob tube. The actual game hardware isn’t really all that sophisticated (the Wii uses much of the same hardware and programming as its predecessor the Nintendo Gamecube launched way back in 2001 – a virtual lifetime ago in the evolutionary age of electronics).
The interface is what makes the Wii interesting. But even as the Wii was just getting off the ground, a young UI engineer name Johnny Chung flipped the Wii concept on its head…sort of literally! While at Carnegie Mellon, Chung posted a YouTube video showing how you could do fairly accurate head tracking by using the Wii’s infrared bar (watch the video and it will all make sense):
Chung got hired on by Microsoft. His interface work isn’t limited to playing games either. Check out his Johnny’s personal web site to see his projects and vitae. Microsoft didn’t waste any time putting Lee to work on its escalation of the console video game interface war. Microsoft announced “Project Natal” at its E3 media presentation in June of 2009. Project Natal is a controller-less interface…or perhaps more accurately, a human-powered interface. In other words, the video game hardware will interact with you based on a combination of body movements/gestures and voice commands. The system is also said to do facial recognition allowing individual users to be differentially recognized by the system. Again, a brief video makes it all clear:
Not to be left out, Sony’s Playstation 3 group made an announcement that brought the controller back to the equation…two of them in fact. And most interesting of all, the technology uses the Playstation Eye camera that has been around for several years. Video break time yet again (hey, would you rather have me write a thousand words asking you to imagine how this stuff works or would you rather see it in action? I thought as much.):
The Playstation Motion Controller extends the Wii methodology and blends it with the emerging concept of “augmented reality” (AR). Unless I miss my guess, AR is going to be a big thing in the next year. It’s popping up all over the place. Augmented reality is already being used for games, iPhone apps, and even a business card that you will eventually be able to make yourself:
Speaking of the iPhone, it has quickly become a very prominent gaming platform. Forget Solitaire, Minesweeper, Bejeweled and Tetris. High quality games are being produced for the iPhone right now including many ports from other platforms. Given that the iPhone is a multitouch interface with a single button that can’t really be used with applications, this presents some interesting new interface challenges.
There are rumors circulating that Apple is also developing a tablet computer that utilizes much of what they have learned in developing the multitouch iPhone interface. You might be thinking “Tablet PC’s have been around for years and haven’t ever really taken off….so what?” Maybe nothing, but Apple has a track record of introducing new interface modalities into the public consciousness. They aren’t the first ones to create such a system either. HP already has a multitouch tablet on the market. There are even demo stations in airports and other high traffic areas. Video. Thousand words. You know the drill:
I’ve been lucky enough to have had a lot of interesting experiences in my career. I’ve worked at big companies and small companies in a variety of industries that have really excited me. This new set of interface challenges are definitely in need of the same scrutiny, research and innovation that has allowed the web to evolve from personal web sites that listed people’s CD collections to the web we see today complete with Rich Internet Applications. And don’t even get me started on Google with its proposed Chrome web operating system and Google Wave (a potential revolution to electronic communication). That’s for another time. For now, let’s just say that these are interesting times for those of us interested in user interface, usability, and user experience.
