PUSHING THE INTERFACE
A bespectacled, slightly overweight man stands in front of a massive flat screen. With a few ‘pull apart’ motions of his fingertips, he zooms from the continental US into downtown Boston, moving from satellite imagery to a detailed roadmap in a few seconds. He flicks into a photo application, flicking thumbnails around and drawing a selection with his index finger before copying and pasting it. With a throwing motion, he sends a couple shots over to a colleague working on another area of the board. It’s Minority Report, come to life (video).
The unlikely hero is Jefferson Han, a previously unknown researcher at Cornell/NYU before making a presentation on his multi-touch interface at a tech conference last year. Since then, he’s been featured in Wired, sold units to the CIA, and helped Apple implement some touch behaviours into the iPhone.
And while the CIA might find spying faster with Hans interface, many people have responded that it looks fun. Alternate interfaces have abounded in the last few years. Nintendos handheld DS means players can draw lines to complete game tasks. Their more recent Wii,with it’s gyroscope enabled controller, means players literally go through the motions of hitting baseballs, weightlifting, and bowling. DontClick has gathered awards and interest in it’s experiment to ditch the traditional interface behaviour. “Do you miss the click?†it asks. 2 to 1 say no, they don’t.
Also, check out Jeff on YouTube. This is taken from the TED Conference (while he was thinner and still looking for VC I think!). There are some amazing videos generated from this invitation only conference, well worth a look too. Thanks to Luke from our NZ office for this post.
