Influx

History shows us that the parts of consumer technology that will change the fastest are the roughest edges: the most unintuitive and irritating aspects. These will receive adequate R&D money and will be the points of improvement upon which companies will innovate and compete.

Often, however, these irritating rough edges are not noticed until they are smoothed out and solved. For instance, imagine a day when electronic device manuals are a thing of the past, when someone can approach a new remote control, PC, GPS system or camera phone and be able to operate it the first time through intuition. Sound impossible? Why should it be?

This is the goal of user-interface research that seeks to take parts of natural, human understanding of how to interact with people and with the physical world and use these as building blocks in designing the next generation of user-interfaces. If you think about it, there is a great wealth of underlying common-sense intuition to draw from: everyone knows how to pick up an object, how to order a hamburger, how to open a lunchbox, etc.

In designing the earliest electronic device interfaces, all the functions were mapped onto two-dimensional boards with buttons, dials and knobs. Due mostly to the inertia of these primitive designs, people now make due with a living room table clad with several absurd 100-button remote controls for their entertainment systems, each with thick manuals and steep learning curves.

But alas, the days where interface designers have to translate all the functions of complicated devices into buttons and 2-D screens are dated. Now the palate of choices is expanding into interactive, multi-modal (multi-sense) interfaces that will allow interface experience to approximate ‘real-life’ physical and social experience, about which we each have an intuitive understanding. These interfaces will be able to do things like read gestures and gaze as well as understand speech. The user will be able to interact in natural, tactile ways with the interface and the interface will be able to ‘touch’ the user back, enhancing the realism and similarity to modeled, real-life situations.
Article entitled, ‘Firms Develop Gesture-Operable Digital Home Electronic Appliances’
A presentation on natural interaction from a Finnish company called VIT