My dream UI: The Natural, Physical, Deep UI
I’ve been very interested in alternative user interfaces for many years. In my voodoopad wiki the topic “My Dream UI” has the tag line “If I just keep throwing ideas together, the big mashed-up blob will eventually become awesomeness” :) So, for my dream UI, I would want:
- Natural UI/Multitouch. You all know what multitouch is, and it’s become mainstream now with the iPhone. (When I started using the term, I was referring to a multitouch surface such as Jeff Han’s table. Several companies and groups are claiming this term as their name now, though).
- Physical UI: Entities in a Physical UI are tangible, physical, can collide, slide, stick, be heavy. The most well known example is BumpTop, which was recently publically released.
- Deep UI: This is my own term for a UI that appears deep, for example by head tracking. The inspiration is Johnny Chung Lee’s excellent wiimote experimentation (bottom of that page). In a Deep UI, when you move your head or rotate the device, you are able to look under foreground objects and see off the side what’s below; e g seeing windows below the foreground window that would be completely obscured if seen head-on.
My dream UI is thus a Deep NUI. From my wiki:
A Deep UI is one that takes the user’s depth perception into account, specifically by using head and/or eye tracking. A Deep classical UI would be a window-managed UI, where one may pan the head to see behind the current window. A Deep NUI is one that uses multitouch surfaces, and applies depth handling. This applies not only to seeing behind flat surfaces in the NUI, but also changing the point-of-view of three-dimensional applications in the NUI.
Addendum: About a month ago, The Astonishing Tribe released a concept of a cell phone with Deep UI! Check it out:
