Unfortunately, we have some bad news about that ground-breaking app: it's been killed. However, we have other exciting news that may lessen the blow.

Recognizr Dies, but TAT's Android UI's Live On

Sadly, the incredible augmented reality/facial recognition application known as Recognizr will not be launched as planned. The app was one of TAT's only consumer-facing efforts and it relied on the facial recognition algorithms from a company called Polar Rose. When Apple acquired Polar Rose in September, the move effectively killed the Android application in turn. (We noticed in August, for example, that it had missed its promised launch date.) At this point, Recognizr won't launch unless another facial recognition company comes to TAT, looking to partner.

TAT may not have crossed your radar until you read about the Recognizr app, but the company has developed a number of smartphone interfaces which you have probably already used, without even knowing it. The company is just not able to talk about those designs due to its agreements with the handset makers and carriers it works with who ship the user interfaces as their own. In fact, I discovered that one of my favorite somethings on a such-and-such device I have in my possession was actually designed by TAT! Sorry to be vague, but that's how it goes.

I was able to catch up with the company at this week's Open Mobile Summit and they gave me a glimpse of some of the designs they have in the works. Below are a few quick videos I shot of the new user interfaces in action. (You can visit TAT's homepage for more professional versions, I just used my iPhone).

Although there aren't specifics to reveal at this time, the "TAT Home" collection of 3D homescreens (you may remember seeing these around the Web earlier this year, for example, on Engadget), is shipping on some Android devices "sometime next year." The devices are on a European carrier, TAT co-founder Paul Blomdahl told me. Discussions with other device manufacturers and carriers are happening now too.

While the homescreen widgets are impressive, I'm personally more fond of the 3D contacts list and mapping application myself, but there are no official deals involving these interfaces yet. (Will someone please change that?)

Android Homescreen Widgets

As described above, these are TAT's Android homescreen replacements which include its own 3D widgets for things like Weather and music.

2D to 3D Maps

TAT has designed a mapping application which goes from 2D mode to 3D mode just by tilting the phone.

2D to 3D Contacts

This contacts application goes from 2D to 3D mode, like the maps one above does, by tilting the phone. In 3D mode, status updates, Tweets and other information hovers above a contact's name. (Sorry I filmed this vertically, video is clearly not my forté).

TAT Live Wallpapers

TAT's live wallpapers also employ the use of Android's accelerometer as you can see in the video below. When you tilt the phone, the trees sway, for example. Other elements on the screen are interactive and respond to touches.

Could Kinect, or something like it, someday be the way we flick a phone call from our mobile device to our smart TV? Could it be the way we gesture in the air to switch views on our home monitor from room to room? Could it be the way we dial our web-connected home appliances up and down, based on recommendations provided by online services that are watching local energy prices fluctuate? In the following article, we'll consider the perspectives of three of the world's top technology analysts, all with very different perspectives on the future of Kinect beyond the Xbox.

Take 1: Kinect is Going to Rock You Like a Hurricane

James McQuivey is a Consumer Product Strategy analyst at Forrester, the second largest firm in the analyst world. He could not be more enthusiastic about the Kinect's potential for disruption. Two weeks ago he wrote a blog post titled Get Ready For Kinect To Completely Change Our Lives.

McQuivey says the Kinect "will usher us into a new era Forrester has entitled the Era of Experience." He calls the Era of Experience "the next phase of human economic development."

"This is an era in which we will revolutionize the digital home and everything that goes along with it: TV, internet, interactivity, apps, communication. It will affect just about everything you do in your home...

"Kinect is to multitouch user interfaces what the mouse was to DOS. It is a transformative change in the user experience, the interposition of a new and dramatically natural way to interact -- not just with TV, not just with computers -- but with every machine that we will conceive of in the future...

"Kinect is to multitouch user interfaces what the mouse was to DOS."

"In this era, companies can no longer succeed by simply building a great product or distributing it efficiently because competitors can do the same. Instead, it is the compelling nature of the total product experience that will create value for consumers. To truly compel, these experiences have to engage your mind, your body, and your sense of self."

Those are strong words! McQuivey believes that in 10 years, 70% of homes will have this kind of technology and be using "dozens of enhanced applications I have imagined as well as the thousands I have yet to envision..."

Will there be a tidal wave of app developers who flood the world of gesture-based interfaces as there has Apple's revolutionary new interfaces? McQuivey says the early conversations he's been having with a wide variety of companies indicates that there will be.

"I've been demonstrating 3D sensing technology to marketers and developers for several months now and each time we get through the demo, people gasp because they quickly see how this will overhaul their businesses.

"Retailers see how it will be the first virtual store technology that really moves people; financial service firms see how it will become a kind of window through which their customers will look to them to graphically render the consequences of their investment decisions; and advertisers see infinite ways they can not only sponsor these experiences but create marketing experiences that are as engaging as the games and movies that people otherwise consume in the living room.

"It is the power of these developers, first summoned by Apple, that will - once they put their hands on Kinect and all its spawn - create the future I am predicting here."

Take 2: Kinect As Post-iPad Technology

Michael Pachter is the video gaming industry's best-known analyst and an advisor to big mutual funds and hedge funds at Wedbush Morgan Securities.

Pachter has paid close attention to the Kinect and he's skeptical, because the XBox360 is a hard-core gamer's console. He suspects that many hard-core gamers are going to be resistent to buy an interface that only appeals to casual gaming family members that would leave them with less time to use their XBoxes.

"It's very much like using an iPad, instead of touching the screen, you swipe your hand across the view of a machine," Pachter says. "It's a very sensitive camera - you'll probably have to move your hand 5, 6, 8 inches - but it's intuitive. I think Microsoft is making an interface like the iPad, much like Windows copied the Mac interface. I think consumers will like that."

Will the Kinect move beyond the XBox? "I would love to talk to my TV," Pachter says. "I hate all the stupid buttons I have to push. It is trainable to do all kinds of things - but I'm not sure if it's going to control other devices."

Take 3: Kinect or Not, the Gesture Web of Things is Coming

Imagine sharing photos from your phone to a friend's phone just by flicking your finger their direction - or putting photos on your TV that way. Imagine transferring a phone call from your phone to your TV with a flick.

Sharma is the analyst who wrote the widely cited research finding that for the first time this Summer there were more connected devices coming online with Verizon and AT&T than new human subscribers.

Sharma is big on wirelessly connected devices and he believes that gesture-based interfaces like the Kinect could be a key way that we interact with those devices in the future.

"The problem will be putting processing power into smaller devices," he says. "But I can see this becoming pervasive in home devices. There might be some short term hurdles, but I think Microsoft will make this available on other devices. If the intelligence is there on the other devices, I think it [a Kinect-type interface] can easily be available."

Sharma points out, however, that Microsoft is far from the only company working on motion-sensing interface technology. Adobe, he says, is working on this "from a content perspective" and he's seen innovative motion-sensing work being done by Invensense. Sony's Playstation Move is related and there are others.

What do you think? Do you think that a motion interface could disrupt the way we interact with all our media and devices in the future? It's a compelling sci-fi vision. As of today, we're a lot closer to finding out whether or not that sci-fi vision of the future will come true.

The codes consist of a series of dots and dashes (like Morse code) placed above and below the Popcode typographic logo. By scanning this marker, the app will quickly download the necessary assets to load a 3D experience based on the markerless tracking of an actual real-world object. Some of the examples in the video below include interactive business cards, maps and t-shirts.

There is something I like about the idea of using a simple marker to navigate to a larger markerless experience. I didn't have to flip through menus or search for the t-shirt example in order to use it. Simply pointing my phone at the Popcode made jumping right into the experience much quicker, and more natural.

There are still uses, of course, for traditional menus and searches, but for object-based example like these, scanning a code to launch it makes a lot of sense. And by using a prettier typographic code (rather than a blocky QR code), it makes these experiences more accessible and raises awareness the way the proposed standardized AR logo would.

Eventually, however, it would be nice to be able to automatically recognize the markerless experience without needing the marker to unlock it - but this is a technological restraint at the moment. Phones and cellular networks aren't really fast enough to query a database with a live stream of video looking for a potentially complex image-based marker. That's why it's so much easier to use the simple black and white markers to act as the gatekeeper, because they are smaller and can be stored locally on the device.

Of course there are projects like Google Goggles that are helping the evolution of this kind of interface, but the give and take between what is done on the phone versus in the cloud is still limiting. Either way, Popcode looks very interesting, but I wonder about how many unique codes they can actually make with their system (without adding more rows of dashes and dots).

The subject of Herigstad's presentation today was new forms of User Interfaces for Web, TV and other media. Examples of the interfaces he discussed were touch screen and "distance gestures" - the latter being what Cruise was doing in Minority Report. Herigstad showed some real world examples of distance gestures, mostly from the TV/movie industry.

Designing for Distance

Herigstad said that the audience nowadays is everywhere: watching TV, using Facebook on their iPhone or computer. Whatever screen wherever - this is where the audience is going. What Schematic is doing in a lot of its design work is considering the distance between a user and the screen, in various contexts. He noted some instances of this analysis:

• Personal media is 1-2 foot navigation - computer, iPhone, etc. Personal devices are where the audience is really close and can actually touch the screen.
• The traditional TV experience is 10 foot navigation; includes friends and family.
• Public media is screens that the audience doesn't own. People can walk up and interact with them. This type of screen can be anywhere from 2-200 foot navigation, and could also include layered navigation (somebody close, somebody far).

Example of DVD content augmented with added interactive media, which could be downloaded from the Web.

Cutting Edge Media Design Concepts

Herigstad drew a big line between distance gesture (TV and public media) and touch gesture (personal media). He explored some of his firm's current interface design concepts. With thanks again to Kaila Colbin's real-time notes, here is a summary:

• Using perspective. Think football game graphics that zoom in and out on your TV screen (see screenshot to the right).
• Products as experiences. They're less about a product (computer, phone, etc) and more about what the user is doing.
• "Your interface is your brand".
• Time: now and next. A lot of projects they're doing are looking at designing concurrently something for now (current reality) and something visionary (your brand in the future when some of these limitations go away). He later discussed the following time chain: archive --> recent --> now --> next --> promo.
• Utilize z-space - dive in, pull back out. Flash is being used a lot now on set-top boxes.
• Hand gesture as input. With his work on Minority Report, his job was to figure out what it will be like to interface with the computer in the future. He noted that one of the inspirations was sign language.
• Pure gestural navigation for TV. They're working with Prime Sense, based in Israel. He showed a brief video of controlling volume using a hand gesture. He loves the purity of not having a remote device. But it's not just for entertainment industry, Herigstad said that it has other implementations - for example doctors in surgery. The overall concept he explained as "training a machine to respond to the language of your hands."
• Brainwaves as inputs they want to get data coming out of your head! (hopefully Marshall doesn't read that bit)
• Screens as wallpaper. Video will not be "furniture" anymore, but part of the background. For example watching a movie across a wall.
• Dynamic Assemblage. Instead of watching online media piecemeal - e.g. YouTube videos found through Google or Digg - Schematic is exploring "advanced metadata" that will assemble your viewing experience automatically. He noted that currently when we watch television, there's a careful production process that happens behind the scenes to craft the branding, promotions, credits, the show itself, etc. He sees that in the future the system will understand these parts, the crafting and user preferences so it will be able to assemble media for you. So 'dynamic assemblage' means that online experiences could look like television in the near future, but assembled automatically.

Minority Report UIs - Not That Far Off?

Herigstad finished by talking about what it means to design for cross media. From a television standpoint, it's very common to have a list of things on the left and some more detail on the right. So some of the interaction concepts they're working on can utilize this. For example with touch gestures, you can touch an item on the left and it would open on the right. With hand gestures, you could gesture at an item on the left and flick it over to the right.

Unfortunately Herigstad couldn't show us some of the things he's working on that use the above concepts, as he's under NDA for a lot of the implementations. But the concepts he discussed today are very thought provoking and give us a glimpse of what media (particularly television and movies) will look like in the future. Because almost all types of media will be on a Web platform in the future, it follows that these concepts will also be very important in the development of Web technology.

German ISP T-Online demonstrated a big multi-touch screen right out of Minority Report at the CeBIT conference in Hannover this week (see this and other videos below). Many other designers are working on variations on that theme. Other designers still are aiming to bring game-like interfaces to other data-centric experiences. What would you like to see in interface design?

Video via a post at the wonderful design blog FreshCreation, the inspiration for this post.

The expectation that something like this will be the interface of the future is pretty widespread, but let's look at some alternatives.

Shadow Play

While that touchscreen looks very cool, it's got its issues too. The video below is from the University of British Columbia and points out some of those issues. I'm not sure if the shadow pointing option is going to work in very many circumstances outside of a classroom.

Via one of the researchers' comments at FreshCreation. See also this version at a home computer.

Just Like Your Real Life Mess

That last video might seem a bit dorky but at least you can imagine some good uses of such an approach. The other end of the spectrum, stunning but a challenge to imagine really using, is BumpTop - a prelaunched, much hyped 3D desktop thing.

Via Metafluence on Twitter

Thought Control

The keyboard and mouse may end up looking like sad relics from a time in history when only a fraction of human capacity to manipulate information was leveraged. Hopefully that won't mean internet brain implants, but for some people it probably will. The following video goes in the "no thanks" column for me. It's called Brainloop and it's from Austria.

Via FreshCreation again.

How About Something More Familiar

One of the reasons we're excited about the launch of Adobe's AIR platform and in Rich Internet Applications in general is their potential for powerful, beautiful new interfaces. It's a lot more accessible for larger numbers of developers than any of the above ever will be. Innovation on AIR in new Twitter clients alone is a fun field to watch.

AIR, Flex and the forthcoming Thermo join Photoshop to make up the newest suite of Adobe tools for interface design. Check out the following video demonstration of the AIR and Flex at work on a Sony Ericsson website. The demo is from Raghunath Rao of Adobe in Bangalore, India.

Throw that onto a touchscreen interface, make it all bigger, and then we're really talking.

2D/3D Gaming

You know what I really want? I want a web experience like the soon-to-launch game Fez. Check out this video, it gets particularly interesting at :30.

Via gaming megablog Kotaku

I want my RSS reader to work like that. Combine some hand motion/touchscreen with some AIR/Flex/Thermo action with some 2D/3D viewing of related documents and I'm going to be in heaven. Make that song in the Fez demo play all the time, too.

Conclusion

Always-on access, the proliferation of publishers, content syndication and an inevitable shift in advertising dollars are all forces contributing to a growing demand for better interfaces. The iPhone's multi-touch interface is also moving things heavily in that direction, which may or may not be good for the web at large.

Other efforts to tackle the same problems include better filtering systems or recommendation engines. Those will make some sense in some cases but day in and day out, we need new interfaces to deal with the explosion of information underway. How do you want to interact with a world drowning in data?

(Maybe all of this is silly and the image below is all we need to know!)

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