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.

Edward Tufte on the iPhone interface

Design guru Edward Tufte has posted a short presentation where he describes the pros and cons of the iPhone interface (warning: it’s a big download).



Basically, he likes the scrolling navigation panes, which he calls “sliding across displays on one surface,” and minimalist controls. However, he dislikes the “cartoony” stock app, which he claims is at the resolution of Excel or PowerPoint instead of the resolution of images. He essentially repeats this critique for the weather app (what I assume is his redesign of the weather app is on the right in the above image). He sums up by stating that clutter and information overload are not attributes of information, but rather failures of design, failures which shouldn't be solved by removing information.

There isn’t a lot new here for iPhone and Tufte fans, but the presentation is interesting and a good description of the pros of the iPhone interface.

via O’Reilly Radar

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

Chronicle.com: Second Life rules!

The folks at the The Chronicle’s Wired Campus Blog has sure been interested in Second Life lately. Well, me too.

The first post describes a new “orientation island” where new visitors to the virtual world learn what it is about. The New Media Consortium has built their own orientation island, apparently because Linden Labs’ version doesn’t do that great a job in explaining some of the features of Second Life.



The second post summarizes Peter Ludlow’s interview with MIT Press. In the interview, Ludlow claims that Second Life is run by the “Greek God method.”

There’s no really set established policy, but they refuse to be completely hands off, too. So they reach in like Greek gods reaching down from Mount Olympus, and they dabble in stuff and screw around and get involved to bail out their friends. . . . It would be much better if they just stayed out completely because then there would be an opportunity for users to create their own governance structures.

This kind of outspoken political critique is par for the course for Ludlow. The Wired Campus Blog reports that he was kicked out of the Sims Online for criticizing the governance structure there.

I’m sympathetic with Ludlow’s desire to see what would happen if Second Lifers could rule themselves, but right now I wonder if the connections between virtual worlds and the real world are too close for Linden to allow something like that. They have an interest in keeping the site somewhat similar to the real world.

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

Speech-to-text using your cellphone

Read/Write Web has posted a review of Jott, a mobile phone service that allows users speech-to-text functions such as dictating email messages. They have just released a service called “Jott Links” (and an API) that allows users to interact with websites like Zillow and Twitter using voice commands and speech recognition.

On the one hand this seems like a no-brainer, the perfect application of this technology. I spent a summer during college working for Speech Technology Magazine, and back then speech recognition software was mainly marketed for people with motor disabilities and those who liked to dictate their texts. With the proliferation of cell phones, it seems like this deployment of the technology should be a perfect fit for most people’s lifestyles. However, the limitations of the technology make me wonder how it will work. I could be hopelessly out of the loop here, but the speech recognition programs that I was familiar with back then depended on creating profiles of individual users, slowly learning how to decode the user’s speech through a trial-and-error process that required a lot of feedback in the form of corrections. Will Jott’s service do this, or has speech recognition evolved beyond this problem? If not, it could be a serious drawback. If a user wanted to post a message to a public service like Twitter, he or she will certainly want to make sure that message doesn’t contain any embarrassing malapropisms.

It will be interesting to see if this feature catches on. There have been some significant developments in interface design lately, most notably the huge response that Apple has received for the iPhone and the iPod Touch, which was just released today. Perhaps they will coexist, and we will get used to an everyware-esque situation where our interactions with computing devices will fit much more naturally in our everyday actions.