Some really cool stuff coming from Microsoft Research. LightSpace is essentially Surface without the table, encompassing the entire environment around you, and controlled by projectors and depth-sensing cameras. Definitely a push towards a gesture-based computing, LightSpace and future research will embrace “device-less augmented reality.”

LightSpace combines elements of surface computing and augmented reality research to create a highly interactive space where any surface, and even the space between surfaces, is fully interactive. Our concept transforms the ideas of surface computing into the new realm of spatial computing.

Instrumented with multiple depth cameras and projectors, LightSpace is a small room installation designed to explore a variety of interactions and computational strategies related to interactive displays and the space that they inhabit. LightSpace cameras and projectors are calibrated to 3D real world coordinates, allowing for projection of graphics correctly onto any surface visible by both camera and projector. Selective projection of the depth camera data enables emulation of interactive displays on un-instrumented surfaces (such as a standard table or office desk), as well as facilitates mid-air interactions between and around these displays. For example, after performing multi-touch interactions on a virtual object on the tabletop, the user may transfer the object to another display by simultaneously touching the object and the destination display. Or the user may “pick up” the object by sweeping it into their hand, see it sitting in their hand as they walk over to an interactive wall display, and “drop” the object onto the wall by touching it with their other hand.

I’ve been visiting ui.stackexchange.com recently as a resource for ui/ux information. It’s a network within Stackexchange, a community powered Q&A hub that allows members to ask, answer, and rate. Here’s what I grabbed from their wiki:

The websites feature the ability for users to ask and answer questions, and through membership and active participation, to vote questions and answers up or down and edit questions and answers in a wiki fashion. Users can earn reputation points and “badges” through site participation; for example, a user is awarded 10 reputation points for receiving an “up” vote on an answer given to a question, and can receive badges for their valued contributions. By collecting reputation points, users are given more and more permissions, ranging from the ability to vote and comment on questions and answers to the ability to moderate many aspects of the site.

There have been some pretty good topics posted (284 as of today), but as with any great site, content is king, so once the community grows, it’ll be a great spot to gain some community insight.

By now, you’ve probably heard, seen, or used Google’s new search interaction, Google Instant. Quick recap: Instant progressively shows results as the user types a query and refreshes results as the user adds each additional character, all the while, providing suggested searches. Here are the benefits Google says will be gained by using Instant:

Faster Searches: By predicting your search and showing results before you finish typing, Google Instant can save 2-5 seconds per search.

Smarter Predictions: Even when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, predictions help guide your search. The top prediction is shown in grey text directly in the search box, so you can stop typing as soon as you see what you need.

Instant Results: Start typing and results appear right before your eyes. Until now, you had to type a full search term, hit return, and hope for the right results. Now results appear instantly as you type, helping you see where you’re headed, every step of the way.

• I’ve noticed that i’ll keep typing my search even though the correct suggestion is right underneath. The 1st suggestion would be shown in gray in the main search bar, and I would dictate to that like I’m playing a typing game.
• I have a habit of pressing ‘Enter’ after a search even when the result is already shown. I feel that when Instant suggests what I might be looking for in the field but I haven’t finished typing the entire query, pressing ‘Enter’ should default to the suggested query.
• Refreshing results with each additional character is extremely fast.
• There should be some type of hotkey to activate the “I’m Feeling Lucky” feature during a search.

I can’t wait to see if Instant will roll out on Google’s other features, especially maps and images. Unfortunately, I’m always expecting this type of interaction on every single search field I use elsewhere on the Internet. But some clever devs have made their own home-brewed versions to work on other services like YouTube and iTunes.

The Social Network’s new Pop-Up Videoesque i-Trailer just premiered on MySpace and allows users to click on hotspots during the video to reveal additional information or video about what they’re seeing. For instance, I didn’t know that Steve Chen, Co-Founder and CTO of YouTube used to work at Facebook when it was still a startup before he left to create the most popular online video service in the world with Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim. The i-Trailer also includes deeper links within the info that pauses the video and shows additional content like images and video:

Check out some more facts from the trailer at Mashable

As gesture and multi-touch interfaces continue to grow and become more adoptable as commonplace features, there seems to be a need to include it in new products. The one concern I have with this type of interaction is using the technology blindly (i.e. changing songs on your iPod Touch in your pocket, typing without looking, etc…) and figuring out how to use the device without any haptic feedback. IDENT Technology’s Gesture Remote is an interesting idea that uses touch and gesture in controlling your television.

Based on the video, Gesture Remote seems like a good idea, but comes with a few usability concerns as well. As Core77 points out, using distance between surface and finger (thumb) as a control mechanism would be difficult to make perfect. Those (elderly, handicapped, etc…) who are starting to lose human mechanical control or me when I’ve had a few coffees or energy drinks too many and starting to get caffeine jitters, would have an extremely difficult time accomplishing a task because we would be incapable or accidentally activating these exploratory features. There are a good number of channels I switch through and would quickly access by typing in the channel numbers, but based on the video, it seems as though numerical input is absent in this device.

I could also see the benefits of the remote – quickly scrolling up and down a long list of lineups in the channel guide, being able to swipe to change volume or adjacent channels, and tap to play/pause. Turning this into a hybrid device with a numeric keypad, and removing the thumb gesture would really make this a pretty interesting product.

In iTunes 10, and perhaps some up-to-date iTunes 9 versions, you can now plug in an iOS device, tell iTunes to Cancel the sync request (and check off “Don’t ask again”), and from there on out simply play music or movies off whatever device you have plugged in through that iconic white cable.

I haven’t tried playing video content because I don’t have any stored on my iPhone, but I would assume it would work as well. This is definitely a feature that should have been available a long time ago, but nonetheless, glad it’s finally implemented!

iTunes 10 is a major release from Apple. In past updates to the application, Apple introduced only new features, but this is the first in a while where the company made some radical interface changes. The most extreme change is most notably the new dock icon, which strangely reminds me of the Windows start icon. Surely, there’s a good reason to back up the change – transition from CDs to all-digital format. But was it a good idea to change something already so memorable and associated with the iTunes brand? Since iTunes was released in 2001, the icon has consistently been a musical note on top of a compact disk. I have to admit, I haven’t been launching the app from the dock as often because my mind’s still not relating the icon to iTunes. There has been such buzz about the redesign, people have started to design their own versions and swapping them out on their own systems. Hell, there’s even a Twitter account (@itunes10icon) comically defending the change.

One of the newest features is a new album view that lets users see the cover of the album, in an effort to reduce redundant album titles. This view seems to only be ideal if I only have albums in my library, but in the scenario in the screenshot above, it clearly raises some issues if I only have 1 or 2 songs from an album. If there is only 1 song, only the album title is listed; 2-4 songs will show the title and artist; and the cover would only be seen if the user has at least 5 songs from that album. Chunking and drawing focus to the album and artwork, I would unnoticeably skip over the tracks that don’t have artwork because they don’t seem as important. I did notice however that this view was the default for Library, but when I changed to another playlist, I was in list view, which was a relief because my playlists don’t usually have entire albums. There is one feature that I think has the most value in this view: the ability to edit artist name or album title in-line, and have those changes apply to the entire album listing. I used to have to highlight all the tracks I wanted to edit, get info, make the changes and press apply, so reducing the workflow by more than half, makes this view a lot more useful to the user.

There have been some subtle UI changes made as well. There’s a new fatter volume bar with a shiny brushed aluminum-like scrubber, which seem to be the only instance of this type of design treatment in the entire app. One of the most obvious is the vertical layout for window controls (Close, Minimize, Maximize). Now more like a traffic light, it makes the entire application seem like it doesn’t belong to OS X, rather, like a third-party app. Because every other application running in the OS has these controls laid out horizontally, this new placement throws off the user’s perception of what they’re already used to. Maybe this is just a taste of what Apple has ready to roll out in their next OS release. There is, however, a way to revert back to the original placement:

1. Quit iTunes
2. Open Terminal
3. Execute “defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -1“
4. Quit Terminal and run iTunes

The iconography in the left navigation has also made a minimal change. Originally, the icons were in color, and seemed to be more active and selectable. Desaturating the icons to be monochromatic makes these categories look inactive and inaccessible. They do make the application look a little more sophisticated and more content-centric in that color appears in only cover art and store images. Again, could this be a change that will be reflected in a future release of Mac OS, for instance, desaturated icons in the finder?

I went back to explore Ping, and quickly noticed that the modal that overlays when images and videos are selected is new. Instead of the dark-and-black lightbox-esque pop-up you would get when watching a trailer in the iTunes Store, this pop-up is white and has a glass-like border, reminiscent of Windows Vista and 7.

When you get to the bottom of the feed, you see text for “More…” but being used to expanding feed interactions like Facebook’s or Twitter’s, I’m expecting more content to either auto-populate when I scroll down, or have an obvious button that I can click to initiate the process. iTunes doesn’t have any type of visual clue to let the user know that text is clickable. Links are blue in Ping, but not anywhere else in the iTunes Store.

Finally, I decided to plug my iPhone in to test “improved syncing.” Visually, the capacity bar is better than it was before. The previous bar was embossed and split up in segments, which I thought was useless and added unnecessary cognitive load.

The process of syncing has also made a minor change. There is now contextual confirmation that shows “Step # of 5,” reaffirming where in the process funnel the user is. Though syncing is an automated process where the user cannot navigate backwards and forwards through (only cancel), it’s nice to let them know what’s going on in the automation, and provide some clues to allow them to predict time until completion.

Overall, there are both negative and positive changes in iTunes 10, unfortunately, more of the former than the latter. There is definitely a drive to keep innovating software at Apple, but there seems to be some disconnect when unifying all of the elements that make up one product. Sure there must be different teams working on various features (iTunes Store, App Store, Ping), but they need to design more uniformly and strictly enforce a style guide to create better usability. Have you given the new update a try yet? What do you think of the new version of iTunes?

I just started to use a new browser-based app called TeuxDeux (pronounced “to-do”). It’s the most beautifully designed to-do list I’ve seen, and the most dead simple to use. What I like most about it is that it doesn’t overwhelm the user with an excessive amount of distracting features. You type in your tasks, hit enter, and you’re done. You can drag and drop tasks on different days, and marking a task as complete is as easy as clicking on it. If you don’t complete a task, it automatically gets pushed to the next day. A nifty feature is the “Someday” list which you can enter in tasks that have no set date yet, for instance, “visit all 7 continents,” or you can get a little creative and add “own my own island.” Their new iPhone app is equally as awesome, featuring some pretty ingenious gestures (watch video below). With the exception of not being able to create repeating tasks, TeuxDeux is simple and to the point, and beats the other to-do apps I’ve used before.

Nick Finck posted this TED talk by John Underkoffler, chief scientist at Oblong Industries. I did research in a Fundamentals of Interface Design course taught by Axel Roesler that dealt with integrating new computing technologies, specifically multi-gestural interactions using Microsoft Surface, into the flight deck of the Boeing Dreamliner. During research, we took a closer look at Oblong’s g-speak and its use of a “spatial operating environment,” and wondered how we could conceptualize useful solutions for a commercial airline cockpit.

I agree with both John and Nick that this it isn’t far-fetched to say that this technology will be commercially available in 5 years because of the exponential pace technology is advancing. Being able to bring the digital and physical world together will definitely better user experiences in the future.