Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Great Blogs about Natural User Interfaces: Joshua Blake Deconstructing the NUI & Jonathan Brill : Multitouch Maven_ (Point and Do)
Josh Blake is a .NET, SharePoint, and Microsoft Surface consultant for InfoStrat, located in Northern Virginia. If you are interested in natural user interfaces, you'll appreciate his blog, Deconstructing the NUI He posts only a few times a month, but what you'll find is thoughtful insight regarding natural user interfaces that rely on multi-touch or gesture interaction.
Here are a few of Josh's posts:
The Natural User Interface Revolution
Pleasing the Brain with Magical Interfaces
Deconstructing: SilverPAC's Multi-Touch Website
Limiting the Multi-touch Vocabulary
Jonathan Brill is an independent consultant who focuses on multitouch product strategy, design, and development, and previously served as an embedded consultant at Microsoft Surface. His blog, Multitouch Maven, provides a wealth of information regarding multi-touch and gesture interaction and interfaces.
Here are a few of his posts:
New Multitouch Interface Conventions
Creating Intuitive Gestures Using Object Orientation
Using Auras to Maintain User Orientation
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Artefact's Blog: Contextual Interventions for Sustainable User Experiences
I recently came across a thoughtful blog post about contextual design and user experience, written by "Dave" at Artefact. In his post, Dave discusses the variety of monitors, interfaces, and devices that have recently been developed to help people monitor and save the energy that they use:
Contextual Interventions for Sustainable User Experiences
"There is a great opportunity to make contextual interventions during people’s behaviors. The intervention might be a change in affordances or simply information. It’s like a nudge but the key is to design influences that are tightly coupled with specific user behavior, making a feedback loop that takes advantage of the way we naturally learn. Thus, it isn’t helping analyze your utility bill, it’s suggesting that you turn off the faucet while you’re not using it."
I especially liked Dave's example of the Disappearing Pattern Tiles. If you stay in the shower too long, the pattern disappears. For people who daydream too much in the shower, this clue might really help them conserve water, in an unobtrusive way.
Disappearing Pattern Tiles
This might work for certain types of people, but some of us might do better with a timer that turns the water from hot to cold after so long. A wake-up call while you take your morning shower! I guess this wouldn't be considered contextual, but it might change long-shower taking behaviors among some of us pretty quickly!
The people who make up the Artefact group are 'big advocates of surface computing and natural user interfaces". Artifact is a research and design studio in Seattle, WA, that designs user-focused software and technology product and services. The Artefact blog posts are informative.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Multi-touch Crayon Physics from multitouch-barcelona, inspired by Crayon Physics by Kloonig Games
Watch how you can draw simple shapes that can instantly turn into a game!
Multitouch Crayon Physics from multitouch-barcelona on Vimeo.
For a better version of this video, see http://www.vimeo.com/980528 For more information, see the RXSurface blog post. On May 18, Multi touch crayon physics will be offered as an alphabeta opensource! The people behind RXSurface are members of the Natural User Interface (NUI) group:
"Natural User Interface or ~ NUI Group is an interactive media group researching and creating open source machine sensing techniques to benefit artistic and educational applications."
