OpenPhotoVR – Open Source Image Stitching
I love this example. Drill into images and see the source images. Fantastic. Open source to boot.
April 2010
Microsoft Photosynth = Dimensional Photostitching
This is a screencam of Tim playing with a Photosynth of a building (The Idaho Capital renovation). It’s a three dimensional (3D) model generated by photos of the building that were stitched together using Microsoft’s Photosynth technology. It’s spectacular stuff with huge implications. Here is a web version of the Taj Mahal. Enjoy!
Minority Report-style Mobile Interface
Minority Report-style Mobile Interface
Some of the folks over in the Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory at The University of Tokyo have prototyped a Minority Report-like touchless gestural mobile interface that, in addition to the ubiquitous air typing, also allows the user to interact with with the interface in 3D.
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Robot Kung Fu!
Seriously, until if we had a cat, it’d be nervous right now. It would need to learn Kung Fu pronto!
Isn’t it really Natural User Interface Transitional?
If you invested 26 minutes into the video we posted here, then you already know where we are going with this post. Just as augmented reality (AR) is only one facet of an embedded interface, touch is only a portion of the entire vision for Natural User Interface (NUI). We are seeing a lot of touch and AR discussions today mostly because there have been advances in technology that are commercially (to we the consumer) available. Not to be a nag, but isn’t about time the problem drives the solution and not technology? Just as we learned during the age of artificial intelligence, technology (specifically improvements in processor speed in this case) will never solve the problem. Complexity must be replaced with simple and elegant solutions. Human’s with dreams must drive these solutions.
What is Natural User Interface (NUI)
So what is Natural User Interface? Natural user interface is the concept that you can touch (or yell at…) and manipulate digital objects much like you would objects in the real world. It’s a hard problem because we have been using mice and keyboards for so long we’ve forgotten what natural really feels like. On a recent cavort through the interwebs, I discovered the following concept and am thrilled to see discussions standardizing the way we talk about NUI.
Unfortunately, gestures like the two-finger-tap and the two finger hold are not natural interactions. We call these types of interactions “NUI Transitional.” They are interactions that are trained/learned that allow fingers to modulate information, but they are not “Present in or produced by nature.” An exaggerated example (talking to you Apple) would be if you have to use four fingers in a swiping gesture (versus 2 or 3) to interact in a specific way, you’re really not experiencing a natural interaction. More likely the software engineers ran out of natural metaphors, right?
A more natural approach
A hold-and-act-upon gesture is a good example of a truer NUI interaction for a touch surface. Specifically imagine you have a piece of paper on your desk and you want to slide it somewhere else. You touch the paper and, while holding your finger down, drag it to another location. Simple right? If you want to draw on that paper you wouldn’t use the same gesture. You also wouldn’t look around for a state-indicating button or icon to make sure you were in draw mode and not move mode, right? Instead you would put one hand (or finger) on the paper to hold it still and the second hand (perhaps with a writing implement) would move the drawing element over the surface of the paper.
This illustration uses Ron’s iconography to illustrate a stateless natural interaction. Specifically, we have one touch point from the left hand thumb holding the page still (a state in itself), while the right hand pinches (not the gesture) three fingers together much like holding a pen and drags across the surface. The result is a hard-to-explain but intuitive feeling writing gesture. I’ll disclaim that last statement in that we have no data to prove how “intuitive” that gesture is, but when we do it ourselves (give it a try) it feels pretty good. Mileage may vary… What do you think?
It’s Augmented Reality Week!
We wish it was a holiday, but alas no. Instead we’ve just got quite a bit to share with regards to the domain and will be posting it throughout the week. We’ve just wrapped a cool research project, filed our patents, and are now working through architecture challenges. Hopefully you will find our work helpful and participate in the NUI discussions happening here and on the web.
3 freaky beautiful robots to usher in the weekend. Enjoy!
The animal forms these devices have been designed carry their own stigmas. Add in it’s a frickin’ man-made robot and YIKERS! These are some freaky, beautiful creatures.
Big Dog
Awesome Fish!!
Nightmare inducing water snake!!! AHHHHHH!
And now a word from our sponsors…
Channel 9 Interviews Joseph and Tim Re Open Source Touch Code.
Developers, friends, countrymen,
Channel 9 and some very cool folks at Microsoft (Marc Schweigert and James Chittenden) talked to Tim and I about our Touch.Codeplex.com open source code. It’s a long video (we take that as a compliment) but reveals quite a bit about our Natural User Interface (NUI) fanaticism.
Favorite Quote: “We want to allow people to touch data.”
The “Anti-Methodology” – A different approach to application design?
Ok, I’ve been hesitant to post this mostly because I don’t feel methodology is a point of competitive differentiation. I do believe great people always do great things and methodology provides a framework to commoditize redundant processes as a platform for them to stand on. But what if there are never redundant processes? What if application design is truly unconstrained by development processes (artificial or not) and instead addresses only the needs of the system (users, business, technology) in an exactly appropriate manner? That’s how we roll when we innovate.
This post isn’t about Agile or Rational Unified Process (RUP) or any other waterfall, hybrid-waterfall, swim-lane, or “Wagile” methodology. Ours is the “anti-methodology.” We steal as needed from all of these processes. You can learn about them here.
Metaphorically speaking, we like to think of our teammates not as “swimmers” or “runners” but as Athletes with medals in specific categories. We have medalists in information design, system architecture design, visualization, product strategy, user strategy, management, and so on. We see it this way because each and every person has enough experience to be able to swim and run with the rest of us through the project iterations. They may not be a medalist in running or swimming sports, but are likely with our team because of their excellence in another. Regardless, they are brilliant, driven, and eager to challenge ambiguity (remember there is no spoon).
Often recruiters or job applicants come to us talking about a specific role like, for instance, a user experience architect. We’re smart enough to realize that we have to address the global community with a shared perception of what a person’s role might be when working with us, and in turn are frequently rewarded with eye-rolls and explanations like, “That person just doesn’t exist.” or “There is no way we can find a designer/programmer/information architect for you.” I wish you would believe me when I say, they do – I’ve hired every one I’ve found. Another popular response is pointing out the “Jack-of-all-trades” dilemma. Respectfully we must point to the origin of the quote and its entirety, “Jack of all trades, master of none, though ofttimes better than master of one.” Is that threatening to you? It shouldn’t be, there is plenty of opportunity for “masters of one”; just not here.
We aspire to become the Polymath. I would even dare to say, it’s a requirement in today’s rapidly changing technological landscape. If you the business or the individual hope to flourish in our ever-commoditizing culture (recession or no) you have to provide value that cannot be reproduced cheaply locally or from afar. Industrial design is experiencing this as China begins providing viable and cheap design resources.
Let me refocus…
When talking about the activity of “wireframing” we have been forced to acknowledge that this activity was created for the right purposes and has since become the crutch of a process that is likely slow, costly, and to some extent inefficient. Wireframing to us is bad drawing (sorry guys, it hurt us too). Our team starts prototyping solutions on the first day of the project in varying levels of fidelity (you might call a prototype “wireframey” except it encapsulates motion concepts, toolkit ideas (i.e. ESRI mapping control), aesthetic goals, and it only answers a predefined subset of the entire solution. The prototypes evolve (in their natural medium) to become the final product so we might actually make this prototype in HTML or Flash. As for use cases, user personae, and functional specifications, we build small prototypes and test them frequently. We don’t believe in document creation for the simple fact that the document is outdated the second it hits the printer (plus we like trees). We believe any method that forces transfer of knowledge is not LEAN and to top it off we have yet to find a client who isn’t really designing an application for people just like themselves.
(pause for rage and flaming)
There are times when we document applications after they have been “in the wild” for long enough to stabilize (testing never stops), so don’t freak out entirely. We really want to illustrate and challenge the industry to rethink the status quo. Another example of our challenge that many in our profession will balk at is that we have had great amount of success focusing less on the user demographics and more on frequently iterated prototyped task flows and testing. People are too complex and diverse for us to presume we can capture anything actionable in a document that takes a month to create.
So, to wrap up this installation, from ideation to realization there are only small cyclic iterations that evolve the solution(s) in their natural medium to their final state. We invite you to explore a world without walls of role description and hope you experience innovation and client satisfaction like we do. Stay tuned for my next post that illustrates how we integrate customers into the design process. It will be called “The We in Innovation.”
NOTE: I will caution the experimenters out there, we have been developing this process for many many years and have burned out a lot of great people figuring it out. We’ve finally made it but this journey will require some bleeding. Good luck, and God Speed.
Why is Tanagram so fascinated with Robots?!?
Because robots, like em or not, are your future. They do amazingly boring tasks perfectly, indefinitely, so you don’t have to. We think automation is exciting and mechanized automation plays a big role in that future. We also have project concepts that will rely heavily on our durable new friends. We’ll share more on that when we can.
For now know that this particular robot is solving a number of real-world supply chain issues including handling a dynamic range of pallet objects and addressing potential impending recall issues by simplifying the warehousing architecture. Simple and beautiful.
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Welcome to the spill. The overflow buffer for the passion we have for interaction.
Spill is the blog from Tanagram, Inc. a technology innovation and design company based in Chicago, Illinois.
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