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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