FluidTunes: Motion interface for iTunes

I downloaded FluidTunes, a gestural interface for iTunes, yesterday and started playing with it. The software, which is Mac-only, uses the iSight camera on your Mac to interpret waving gestures which are used to browse your iTunes music library. Right now FluidTunes is only available for Mac, and it only works on systems with a camera. Here’s a demonstration:

While the software is pretty innovative, I found the user experience to be disappointing. Your iTunes library can only be navigated song-by-song which makes FluidTunes unwieldy for large music libraries. Additionally, I found it somewhat difficult to control the interface. Positioning my hand in the correct part of the camera’s view to get the program to recognize my motions was tricky, so it was hard for me to select the song I wanted. My head, however, was always in the right position, so if I moved it slightly—by stretching my neck, or turning around—it caused me to further lose my place.

Overall, I think this project is a great demonstration of the kinds of things that can be done with the iSight camera, even if it still needs a bit of tweaking.

via: LifeHacker

Multi-touch

Apple has updated their MacBook Pro line of laptops, adding the multi-touch feature introduced with the MacBook Air. This article by Tom Krazit speculates on the future of this technology and how Apple and Microsoft will be deploying it in the future. As usual, Apple seems to be pushing the development of this technology—Krazit reports that other laptop vendors will be pushing similar technology soon. Hopefully this doesn’t mean there will be a bevy of competing standards and interfaces for users to deal with.

DIY ‘Minority Report’ multi-touch interface

A grad student from Carnegie Mellon named Johnny Lee has posted a video demonstrating how the Wiimote can be used to create a multi-touch, gestural interface similar to the ones seen in Minority Report.

His website has some other interesting videos showing his work with motion tracking and interfaces.

via Make blog

The evolution of gestural interfaces

A number of entities are trying to solidify a set of standards for gestural interfaces like the iPhone and iPod Touch. Designer Dan Saffer is calling for a gestural standard and has created a wiki for defining that standard. Here’s part of Saffer’s description of the project:

Work has been done already, of course. Robert Cravotta has done a good job with this overview in EDN magazine, and Bill Buxton has started an impressive list of new input devices and technologies. But we need to help create this shift in input devices, not just follow along behind the technology. And if we wait, well, we’ll simply find individual companies (Apple, Microsoft, Perceptive Pixel, etc. etc.) creating their own standards (as is being done now). And while this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, one can easily imagine having to remember a crazy amount of movements and gestures for common actions. (“Wait, to turn on the lights do I tap the wall, or wave a hand? Is this an iRoom or MS Rume?”) We’ll get a lot of ad hoc solutions—some of which will be great, some not so much. Standards and a pattern library would help.

What we need is some sort of standards board similar to the W3 or an advocacy group like the Web Standards Project. At a minimum, we need to start collecting the gestural patterns that are emerging, much as Jenifer Tidwell (and others) did for screen-based patterns. Even something as simple as the Ajax Pattern Library would be useful. The Interaction Design Association (on whose Board I sit) would seem to be a likely home and resource for some, if not all, of these things. The question is just having designers engage with the issue.

Additionally, Apple has created a set of iPhone Human Interface Guidelines for developers. It will be interesting to see what sorts of solutions emerge to this problem. I would be surprised if the kind of board that Saffer is suggesting doesn’t get created. In this situation, there is much more incentive for manufacturers to get together on solutions rather than duke it out with proprietary solutions as with the current HD-DVD/Blu-Ray war.

via Read/Write Web