Hello Computer

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Darryl

hello computer

The science fiction genre is a wonderous vehicle for giving us a glimpse into our future, the technologies we might be using, and how we’ll possibly interact with one another amidst the vast information networks influencing our daily lives.

Since its release almost a decade ago, Minority Report remains one of the most referenced sci-fi movies for futuristic user interface design. Admittedly, I’ve used various screen captures from the scenes involving the PreCrime visualizations (or what ever it was called—that funky gesture-based interface Tom Cruise and company used to catch criminals) at police headquarters on a few creative mood boards over the years, as have a lot of other art directors I imagine.

As I mentioned on the StruckAxiom blog, there’s no denying gesture based UIs will someday replace mouse and keyboard inputs. Technologies like Pranav Mistry’s SixthSense UI and more recently Apple’s Siri, suggest we’re heading towards a dematerialized future of seemingly invisible devices in which conventional screen based interfaces will eventually be replaced by more natural forms of input. Speaking and physical body movements come to mind. In fact someday simply clicking a mouse or tapping a touch sensitive screen may seem like a painfully archaic way to interact with information when less repetitive strain inducing forms of HCI become available.

I recall seeing John Underkoffler demo his g-speak UI research at FITC back in 2010. It was amazing. I thought to myself, the UI concepts depicted in Minority Report were no longer science fiction, but were arguably becoming science fact.
Underkoffler said he believed (at the time) we were 5 to 7 years away from interfaces similar to Minority Report. Though now I tend to think a more ambitious mind/machine UI leap will be in the realm of cybernetic implants akin to The Matrix or Brainstorm —no, not that thing you do at creative meetings—the 1983 sci-fi movie starring Christopher Walken.

But it’s fair to argue cybernetic interfaces may be much further off —after all, who really wants a network ethernet cable plugged directly into the back of their neck? Who would want their thoughts recorded and played back for others to experience?
Perhaps learning jujitsu in a matter of seconds would have benefits. Why bother going to martial arts classes for years when you could perform a near instantaneous knowledge transfer downloaded directly to your cerebral cortex. One day something similar to this scenario may finally render books, digital texts, and all conventional forms of media consumption permanently obsolete. Oh, but how would advertising function in such a hyper-knowledge based society? Would we pay subscription fees to agencies like Rekall providing weekly memory implants and virtual vacation experiences to Mars like the ones Douglas Quaid took?

Maybe those of us employed as the UX designers and application developers of today will be the ones crafting the memory plug-ins of tomorrow. True escapism and one of a kind out-of-body immersions, all for the incredibly low price of $195 per petabyte of data assimilation. Sounds like a bargain, until you have a psychotic break from reality.

Still, these types of ‘virtual’ experiences through seemingly direct mind/device neural interfaces sound down right nightmarish compared to current augmented reality concepts —which is fitting, when you consider dystopian themes run rampant in sci-fi. Though I’m not really sure why.

So here it is, the ultimate user interface, my theory for Steve Jobs’ inspiration for Siri: a funny scene in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (yes, that strange image above).
Captain Kirk and the Enterprise team travel back in time to save the world from, you guessed it, some advanced alien intelligence threatening to destroy the human race. Commander Scott finds himself in front of a primitive computer of the day (a Macintosh by the looks of it, circa 1986).
Low and behold Mr. Scott is surprised to learn he must use a keyboard instead of (gasp!) voice recognition. “How quaint, a keyboard” he says, as he begins to effortlessly type out the molecular formulas for 1-inch thick transparent aluminum. No problemo.

Posted in culture, media & technology, user experience | Leave a comment

The Transient Nature Of Digital Text

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Darryl

letters in stoneNicholas Carr believes digital publishing tools are ushering in an era of perpetual revisions and updating. Literary works and essays once synonymous with a ‘set in stone’ sense of permanence are now, as Carr puts it, losing their ‘fixity’ in the digital space.

The e-book industry’s embrace of cloud-based technologies, for example Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing service, means book authors, once accustomed to a publish-and-leave-it process (or at least until subsequent book editions are released) can now upload edits to their manuscripts indefinitely—and immediately—when the desire hits:

Once digitized, a page of words loses its fixity. It can change every time it’s refreshed on a screen. A book page turns into something like a Web page, able to be revised endlessly after its initial uploading. There’s no technological constraint on perpetual editing, and the cost of altering digital text is basically zero. As electronic books push paper ones aside, movable type seems fated to be replaced by movable text.

Bloggers, in particular, intuitively know the power (and perhaps drawbacks) of being able to constantly rewrite, edit and tweak written posts on a whim. The book publishing industry though, still seems to be coming to terms with the inherently transient nature of the digital format. While individual authors may feel a sense of empowerment with fewer obstacles in place to getting their works in front of readers, publishers will perhaps regard the waning market for paper books as a disruptive and unavoidable phase in the evolution of the book publishing industry.

(Photo credit: myfear)

Posted in culture, media & technology, technology | Leave a comment

Brighter, Faster, Slimmer Smartphones

Posted on December 27, 2011 by Darryl

This spot introduces AT&T's 4G LTE and its blazing fast speeds.

Witness the major telecoms digging deep into their cavernous pockets, unleashing an absolute flurry of smartphone and tablet Ads upon us this holiday season. The modus operandi for successfully placing a brand new rectangular slab of glass into the hands of every semi-sentient being on the planet with a pulse seems to be repetition, repetition, and more advertising repetition.

All About Speed
The message above in the funny spot for AT&T’s new 4G LTE is all about the blazing fast speeds. The two speed-savvy football fans on the left, armed with such fast phones, seem to almost know events before they happen, much to the bewilderment of their fellow tailgaters who are presumably using much slower phones.

All About Multi-tasking
A number of other popular smartphone and tablet spots tout the power of multi-tasking, as though the ability divide one’s attention simultaneously among 3 to 5 independent tasks is both desirable and somehow cognitively empowering.
RIM’s struggling Playbook tablet famously harped on this capability, quite unsuccessfully though, attempting to differentiate a seemingly awkward device—glorious half-baked Android emulator and all—through sheer performance and multi-tasking muscle.
Nevermind the Playbook was over-priced, under-designed, and behind the 8-ball when it came to its sterile selection of apps, the 1 GHz dual-core processor and 1 GB RAM ultimately failed to lure early adopter tech-heads and application developers or put a meaningful dent in iPad sales. But hey, it ran Flash—natively. Remember that obscure little, recently ostracized, plug-in? The one allowing you to experience all the rich quirky stuff the Web had to offer. Unfortunately an entire generation of iOS users will never know the mindless fun of pranking someone with a Schwarzenegger soundboard.

Location, Location, Location?
While the proliferation of mobile devices continues to grow, the sluggish adoption of location-based tools (e.g. Foursquare, Gowalla) has been surprisingly relegated to a small portion of the mobile users’ digital psyche. Mobile audiences perhaps have yet to see the intrinsic value of ‘check-ins’, unlocking rewards and earning badges as important aspects of their mobile experience. The concept of becoming mayor of your favourite coffee shop or local restaurant appears to hold trivial significance in the lives of most people and comes off as a crude attempt at gamification —that nauseatingly over-referenced buzzword of 2011.

Let’s check-in next year and see if anything’s changed regarding the popularity of location-based tools.

Posted in advertising, mobile marketing | Leave a comment

The Web’s Next Act

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Darryl

Next Steps -The Truman Show Finale

Imagine for a moment your Internet connected life as you currently know it, exists as a series of pre-programmed events. A meticulously constructed digital reality where everything (and everyone) you interact with is almost perfect, governed by a universally agreed upon set of technological standards and best practices.
The grand architect sits high in the sky in awe of his thriving creation, trying to anticipate what should come next. All the while analyzing data, optimizing the experience and tweaking the patterns of design. Teams of technicians and engineers faithfully implement the architect’s master vision, placing products, pulling and prodding the algorithmic strings that ultimately dictate the nature of this constantly evolving system.

The vast majority of us who peruse the Web are quite happy with the way things are. The cloud has everything we could ever possibly want or need, say the info-tech pundits. Work in the cloud, play games in the cloud, stream music and movies from the cloud, socialize with your friends in the cloud.

But you’re wondering, and hoping, there’s more to the Web than just this over-hyped cloud nonsense. More than the hyper-detached silos of content surrounded by the massive walled garden that locks-in all the data generated by our online movements and activities, devoid of any discernible URIs.

On a brighter thought, the next dominant subtext of the Web is often imagined as a more collaborative, (artificially) intelligent, and socially semantic digital construct. Of course, don’t forget open, transparent and yes, decentralized. Scour the Web and you’ll find these are some of the popular memes gaining traction of late. Also the usual predictive speak: the Web will integrate more seamlessly with our daily lives, be quicker, more productive and user-friendly a place in the future.
User-friendliness—now there’s a cliché, once aptly referred to as “the rhetoric of the technology which consecrates our ignorance”. While the Web may or may not be getting easier to use, ignorance and stupidity show no signs of waning online.

Louis Grey believes the next stage of the Web, or third wave, will be uniquely personal (the second wave we are currently in being Social). Indeed, it’s probably inevitable we’ll reach a point when popular conventions of the day, ‘liking’ things and ‘following’ people (and brands), eventually lose their appeal as people strive to inflect more meaning into their digital streams rather than merely running around earning Foursquare badges and higher Klout scores. Louis Grey writes:

Now that the world’s information is posted, linked, indexed and searchable, and friends are connecting, sharing, liking, and following, the quest is on to streamline the noise and give the Web another dimension – one not measured by the data, or who led you to the data, but you as an individual. The third wave of the Web, is going to be about personalization by individual based on that individual’s preferences – explicitly stated or otherwise.

Grey’s ideas sound almost utopian considering the characteristically impersonal nature of digital communications.
Jaron Lanier sees the Web as a moderately oppressive place for the creative class. Yes that’s right, he’s talking people like us—you, me, the struggling writer down the street. In his book, You Are Not A Gadget, Lanier suggests forms of personal expression and the individual voice—much more vibrant during the early days of the Internet—are now under threat by unscrupulous “cloud owners” intent on profiting from intellectual properties and creative works without adequately compensating content creators.

The question of compensation and wealth distribution runs deeper when you consider the Web’s growing commercialization as it rears its ugly head in the form of media paywalls and centralized social networks. Many of the high traffic digital properties encourage content contributors to produce original material in exchange for exposure rather than monetary compensation. The Huffington Post, most notably, has been highly criticized in the past in this regard for not paying their legions of writers.
Application developers too, face challenges despite the lucrative growth of the mobile app market. Major host platforms, in some cases, take a 30% cut out of the developer’s pocket. And then of course there’s Mark Zuckerberg and company, charging a whopping 30% fee to developers on game transactions and brilliantly devising a proprietary credit system rather than rely upon PayPal or major credit cards.

Does this seem like a fair and equitable way to treat the very people who contribute to some of the best and brightest aspects of the new digital economy?

Posted in culture, media & technology, thoughts & ideas | Leave a comment

iPad: Is It Really A PC?

Posted on November 28, 2011 by Darryl

Bickering over iPad: Is it a PC or not?

Last week it was announced Apple is on track to becoming the world’s number one vendor of personal computers. By some estimates they will overtake Hewlett Packard sometime during the second half of 2012. This prediction is based largely on Apple’s stellar growth throughout 2010-2011, but most notably, by factoring in sales of the popular iPad tablet—a device one Wired Magazine columnist solemnly proclaimed as “a computer with limited capabilities”.

A fair assessment? Depends how much you like to tinker around with the operating system or install “unofficial” applications Apple may deem too risqué or inferior for the App Store. If your answer is yes: I like the freedom to install anything I choose, then perhaps an Android device would better satisfy your inner geek.

While it may be easy to criticize the iPad’s shortcomings, its rise along with the Kindle and numerous other tablet devices raises a fundamentally intriguing question. “What exactly is a PC?” And, does the iPad qualify as a full-fledged “personal computing device?”

TechCrunch columnist MG Seigler suggests tablets and smartphones have ushered in a new age of truly “personal” computers because these smaller devices, every bit as sophisticated and capable as desktop computers, go with us everywhere:

Now we’re in the midst of another new age. People are now carrying around computers in their pockets, called smartphones. But those aren’t considered PCs. Instead, they’re considered descendants of the original mobile phones. The truth is that they’re closer in just about every way to a personal computer — in fact, they may be the most personal computers ever. But they look more like phones, so we consider them phones — even as people make fewer and fewer actual phone calls on them.

I own all sorts of computer devices, including an iPad 2. Many of these devices get used for work and leisure related activities. Based on my own personal usage habits though, I would be a little skeptical at this point calling the iPad a fully functional personal computing device, namely because my definition would encompass the ability to create new things and not just passively consume existing things.

But if you’re happy to just read the news, organize your music and photos, do the occasional crossword puzzle or play an enthralling game of Angry Birds, then the iPad will almost certainly become your quintessential device for such activities.

If on the other hand you’re interested in doing a little more —say, getting a bit of actual work done, I wish you the best of luck. Believe me I’ve tried, valiantly. Which leads me to expose a few personal (underline personal) reasons why I feel the iPad isn’t quite a full blown computer yet:

I can’t edit my blogs. The official WordPress app, I’m afraid to report, is buggy and seems incapable of recognizing when I’ve edited posts or made dashboard changes on other devices. The same issue strangely occurs in Safari—perhaps something to do with the cache—I don’t know, I don’t really care at this point. I’m embarrassed to say I squandered an entire evening once fiddling around trying to get this all working—to no avail.

My other blog—mostly a scrapbook of sorts for creative inspiration and ideation—lives on Tumblr. The official Tumblr app for iPad, while bug-free, looks as though it has been designed exclusively for iPhone screen dimensions. Oddly, you must scale-up the app ’2x’ to fill the iPad’s 1024-by-768-pixel resolution display. At these dimensions, at 132 pixels per inch (ppi), everything appears blurry as though the screen were rendering a 36 dpi rasterized image at three-times its native pixel dimensions. After a few minutes browsing my Tumblr feed under these circumstances I feel the urge to jump back onto my old laptop.

There’s no physical keyboard. The iPad’s on-screen ‘touch’ keyboard is quite nifty, a digital design marvel indeed. The odd Tweet or few sentences here and there are no problem. But writing a few hundred words for a blog post or preparing a lengthy document with charts and graphics in MS Word or Excel and things become somewhat dicey. I just can’t seem to get into a solid rhythm, mainly because the iPad’s keyboard occupies half the screen and doesn’t leave much room for anything else. Unless you don’t mind scrolling all the time to see what you’ve written, a separate keyboard provides the elusive tactile feedback and texture of 3-dimensional buttons the iPad simply cannot provide—ergonomically that is—by typing on a flat piece of glass.
In fact it occurred to me the other night watching the Harlan Ellison documentary Dreams with Sharp Teeth on Netflix why so many creative writers still prefer a manual typewriter over a computer. It’s all about feel. Modern keyboards (and of course touch-screen displays) provide absolutely no feel. Everything is now super sleek “flat”. No wonder Industrial Designers invariably end up working in software development as “UX Designers” —many of the physical objects we use are either being repurposed or replaced outright by screen based digital products, keyboards indubitably included.

I know what you’re thinking. Go out and buy an external keyboard you say, instead of fumbling around with iPad’s über minimalist screen-based keyboard. Yes, a folding wireless keyboard would be a great little stocking stuffer this Christmas. But as someone who already owns 2 laptops and a full-size desktop, I don’t particularly want (or need) another keyboard to augment my iPad and certainly not one requiring a proprietary Apple connector.

Working with Adobe’s full Creative Suite of applications would be a challenge. Photoshop Touch, are you kidding me? Not if I wanted to do anything beyond a rudimentary colour correction or default photo filter effect. Premiere, After Effects, Flash, Dreamweaver, Illustrator —all these brilliant creative tools were never designed to be used via multi-touch input—at least not yet. I cringe at the thought of trying to close-crop an image with my finger sliding across the screen. My fingers are simply too fat to accurately guide a lasso tool around the perimeter of an intricate shape.

The screen is too darn small. Maybe Apple will release a 17-inch or larger version of the iPad for creative professionals sometime in the near future. However unlikely, the current screen dimensions are simply not conducive to long bouts of detail-oriented visual work. If you’re normally used to designing on a spacious 1920-by-1080-pixel display, the iPad’s limited screen dimensions become a rather crude awakening.

Overall the iPad is a fantastic piece of technology, aside from its seemingly minor limitations. As an educational tool I can say the iPad has been an incredibly effective supplement encouraging our 5-1/2 year-old son’s learning and cognitive development —the key word being supplement. For the iPad isn’t a PC replacement, although it does represent an innovative step forward that tends to challenge our existing notions of ‘personal computing’.

Posted in culture, media & technology | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment