The program is designed to provide a much more natural way for humans to digest large palettes of information without losing their way — an idea that anyone who has analyzed giant spreadsheets may welcome. And while it has something in common with spreadsheets and many other technologies, Flake says Pivot is so new and different that it’s difficult to even picture what it does without seeing it in action.

User interface designers usually differentiate between which interface, search or browse, is better suited for a particular task with the terms “recall” and “recognition,” referring to what is going on in the user’s mind. If the user is relying on recall, they are able to proactively retrieve what it is they want out of their memory. For instance, the traditional command line, is a recall, or search (with tab completion), based interface. In contrast, if the user is relying on recognition, they need to be able to see particular terms or objects on the screen before they are able to make a decision on what to do next. For instance, the standard GUI is fundamentally a recognition, or browse-based interface.

Often people focus more on the examples given than the fundamentally different aspects of the two types of interfaces, and assume that one type of UI is better than the other:

I used to use the command line, but then the GUI became popular, I hate remembering stuff, browse is better! Recognition beats recall!

I used to use the Yahoo Directory to find stuff on the Web, but then Google came out, I can quickly get to stuff, search is superior! Fast beats slow!

Or, in the case of the Firefox UI: I used to use the bookmarks sidebar to access things, but now I just use the awesome bar, it’s so much faster, search is the future!

But battling the different interface examples against each other somewhat misses the point.  It isn’t about which interface, search or browse, is better than the other, it’s about which is a better match for the user’s particular task, and which is a better match for the user’s mind.  So it is critical to provide the user with both, and to make sure that both are extremely well designed. The Web browser UI has a lot of useful core controls for browsing information, a home control to take you back to the beginning, back and forward to explore a timeline of recent navigation, and a location bar lets you jump directly to an entirely new destination.  These controls could be really useful for browsing history and bookmarks, in addition to browsing Web pages.  So I believe we should fully integrate bookmarks and history into the Web browser interface.

This is a concept for a language learning game. Idea is to use voice and video for an immersible experience. Goal for the gamer is to teach meet and greet skills that are very basic for conversation in some other culture.

[ad]

IBM engineers are demonstrating the integration of Lotus Sametime with the several virtual world platforms.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzuiEzTah5w

A 3-D meeting can be launched directly from within Sametime, creating a virtual meeting space that uses Sametime capabilities available in a virtual environment, including presentation tools, access to the avatar’s inventory and full avatar functionality demonstrating the business value virtual environments can bring to the future of unified communications.

This is a proof of concept and a first good step. There are lot of companies trying to develop gaming and informal environments such as second life. I believe, virtual world is moving towards augmented reality. We have processor speed now that could process CGI animation in real time using a normal desktop computer. 

I think we would see a lot of application focusing on virtual and augmented reality.

What’s made Google search, Facebook, the iPod, and Firefox household names? They all keep interaction to a minimum. The best presentation of content is the one which requires the least number of clicks and choices. Information overload is daunting: Few clicks and choices means more people stay and use your site. Avoiding interaction seduction allows you to create interfaces that are easier to learn and faster to use with surprisingly delightful interfaces. As an example, we’ll see what Google search would have looked like if the Lobby For Advancement Of Carpal-Tunnel Syndrome had got their way.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuELwq2ThJE

Aza gave his first talk on user interface at age 10 and got hooked. At 17, he was talking and consulting internationally; at 19, he coauthored a physics textbook because he was too young to buy alcohol; at 21, he started drinking alcohol and co-founded Humanized. Two years later, Aza founded Songza.com, a minimalist music search engine that had over a million song plays during it’s first week of operation. After Humanized was sucked into Mozilla, Aza became Head of User Experience for Mozilla Labs. In another life, Aza has done Dark Matter research at both Tokyo University and the University of Chicago, from where he graduated with honors in math and physics. When not working (ha!) Aza enjoys playing music and punning.

Anyone dealing with statistics should be empowered with the tools and techniques to present data like what Hans is doing in this insightful presentation. Am now exploring his initiative to bring all publicly funded database into the fore via www.gapminder.org.

Google has acquired Hans Rosling’s Trendalyzer software, which the Swedish demographer and his team at Gapminder(http://tools.google.com/gapminder) have developed since 2005 to generate more useful visualizations of facts and figures. Rosling has met the Google founders at TED2006, where he gave a thought-provoking speech on the nature of statistics and the general misinterpretation of them

This is a cheap, scalable multi-touch and pressure-sensitive computer screen interface that may spell the end of point-and-click. 

The future use of multi-touch technology is expected to rapidly become common place. For example, touch screen telephones are expected to increase from 200,000 shipped in 2006, to 21 million in 2012.

While Touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact, Multi-Touch systems enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, allowing for the use of both hands along with chording gestures. These kinds of interactions hold tremendous potential for advances in efficiency, usability, and intuitiveness. Multi-Touch systems are inherently also able to accommodate multiple users simultaneously, which is especially useful for collaborative scenarios such as interactive walls and tabletops.

A demostration of Augmented Reality…the seamless mixing of the real and the virtual. Quite simply, this is the future. AR has unlimited potential, the potential to give us virtualy anything anywhere.

For many of those interested in AR, one of its most important characteristics is the way in which it makes possible a transformation of the focus of interaction.

The interactive system is no longer a precise location, but the whole environment; interaction is no longer simply a face-to-screen exchange, but dissolves itself in the surrounding space and objects. Using an information system is no longer exclusively a conscious and intentional act

Jonathan Harris wants to make sense of the emotional world of the Web. With deep compassion for the human condition, his projects troll the Internet to find out what we’re all feeling and looking for.

This is truly amazing project. The ways in which he wields technology to help us better understand, and thus appreciate, our fellow man are, quite simply, brilliant. I wasn’t able to see his recent “I Want You To Want Me” done with Sep Kamvar but judging from this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZUaXDm4qik), it turned out beautifully. The documentation of their process is also worth a peek: http://www.iwantyoutowantme.org/process.html

I believe this could be a very sophisticated framework to build next generation learning content. At present we are mostly waiting for head-mount display technology to mature. When we have a full color sunlight-readable overlay display with an apparent resolution of about 90dpi at 2feet (say, 180 arc-seconds) this will really take off.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9KPJlA5yds

The car is just an example but think how far the e-learning industry can go with this technology. There are already some prototypes with children book and story telling out there in the market. I think we need companies to invest in custom content development projects in this platform. I believe this will change the way we perceive online learning.