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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?

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Posted by Joseph Juhnke on April 26, 2010

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