[HN Gopher] A brief rant on the future of interaction design (2011)
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A brief rant on the future of interaction design (2011)
Author : picture
Score : 205 points
Date : 2022-05-25 22:12 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (worrydream.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (worrydream.com)
| notjustanymike wrote:
| Why is it that, without fail, design sites talking about user
| experience have a tiny gray font?
| picture wrote:
| You may use reader view, or zoom in. I opine that good design
| isn't just about being usable to the lowest common denominator
| (like huge font for grannies) but rather giving the user the
| power to customize their own experience.
| notjustanymike wrote:
| This means the "good design" comes from the additional
| functionality provided by the browser to overcome to the poor
| choices of the site.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Well this _granny_ doesn't have perfect vision so it's nice
| when the default isn't tuned for perfect human specimen,
| especially when the default doesn't seem to buy us anything
| (what does grey text accomplish?).
|
| Not that this website is _that_ bad... I just find this
| attitude to be annoying. :) Maybe I'm still in partial denial
| about my deficiencies.
|
| Thank goodness for my browser's reader mode though when the
| website has way too long lines. No credit to the website
| designers, of course.
| underbluewaters wrote:
| I've seen demo mobile apps that used the vibration motor to give
| haptic feedback, simulating the feel of buttons and such as you
| moved your finger across the screen. At the time I thought for
| sure the next iPhone would feature "Haptic Touch" apis and it
| would just be a given in a few years. Still waiting...
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Well there is haptic feedback on the newer phones, usually to
| tell you you've crossed some drag- or timer-based threshold,
| but yeah it's pretty limited in scope.
| PhilipTrauner wrote:
| _UIFeedbackGenerator_ (https://developer.apple.com/documentatio
| n/uikit/uifeedbackge...) has been around for a while, but it's
| not exactly capable of "positional" feedback. Still, vibrating
| in response to actions such as rearranging list entries or drag
| interactions that require a certain distance threshold to be
| passed can feel quite satisfying.
| douglaswlance wrote:
| The future of digital interaction will be three dimensional and
| skeumorphic.
| city17 wrote:
| I also have a preference for more tactile inputs and was looking
| around earlier at some different controllers, e.g. MIDI sliders,
| knobs, buttons that you can connect to pretty much any
| application. Or alternatives like the Surface dial or Streamdeck.
|
| Interested to hear if anyone has a setup like that that feels
| nice and is actually useful?
| nathias wrote:
| bring back old school mechanical knobs
| bmitc wrote:
| It's really unbelievable how effective knobs, switches,
| buttons, dials, and dedicated screens or displays are.
| a4isms wrote:
| Says EVERYONE who drives a late-model car that sticks
| everything behind the sliding fingers under glass UX, from
| climate controls to the volume of the stereo.
|
| This is a known problem, and one that will get people killed,
| because it demands that drivers focus on the infotainment
| screen and not the road to do a mundane task that their tactile
| fingers could easily perform on their own with mechanical
| controls.
| nfoz wrote:
| Using synthesizer hardware is a joy of an experience.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| It's interesting tha synthesizers went through this already.
|
| In the 70's and early 80's--analog synthesizers--everything
| was knobs, sliders, and real buttons.
|
| Then everything was stuffed behind a minimum of buttons and
| maybe 1 or 2 knobs/sliders if you wer lucky, and a plethora
| of options and menus buried behind often a thin 16x2 LCD
| display.
|
| That was the early to mid 90's--analog sounds in electronic
| music started making a comeback, and by the latter half of
| the 90's and beyond everything started to have knobs and
| sliders again, even if the internals were no longer analog.
|
| I do wonder if not for that trend driven by the TB-303 and
| what not, would that even have happened to synthesizers.
|
| Maybe the same blacklash and pendulum swing will happen with
| everything else, but it seems like there's more pressure than
| ever to make users fit the product and save costs that way,
| rather than make the product for users and accept the price
| increases.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| The most praised multi purpose keyboard maker out there is
| Nord, and the whole point of their stuff it's that the
| interface is physical knobs and buttons
| bowsamic wrote:
| Imo, the idea that it would be great to type on a glass touch
| screen is Steve Jobs biggest and most long-lasting misstep.
|
| Overall I think it's interesting and bizarre that both modern
| technology and visions of the future have totally sacrificed
| tactility. It seemed to be all about removing the real world:
| tactile interfaces are old fashioned, in the future everything
| works in a way that has minimal connection to reality, e.g. a
| Minority Report style UI, and so obviously is ethereal and cannot
| be touched. It makes me wonder why we had that ideal in the first
| place, and whether that ideal shaped technology or vice versa.
| Why did we fantasise about losing tactility?
|
| Something I've also noticed is that we almost seem to be unable
| to imagine a programmable tactile interface, even in science
| fiction. I guess humans wanted "something extra/futuristic/other-
| worldly", and that meant having things be unlike anything else in
| the world, which as the author points out, means something
| without tactility.
| mrbombastic wrote:
| IMO tactility was sacrificed in favor of versatility because we
| don't have a material that is both tactile and versatile and
| simulating such a thing is hard. And IMO it was a good tradeoff
| to make, instead of a tactile keyboard you have a keyboard that
| is infinitely adaptable. Maybe that changes with AR advances,
| could be gloves? embedded chips that send electrical impulses
| to your hands? an actual material versatile enough to be
| tactile and adapt to all the needs of a modern computing
| environment? But all those seem pretty far fetched to get into
| consumers hands in the near future and certainly back then.
| There are slight advances here with things like haptic engines
| in phones but it is still a far cry from the feel of a real
| tactile substance.
| xav0989 wrote:
| IIRC, there was a US Navy ship whose stations had physical
| buttons, knobs, and switches that were software controlled, as
| in they mapped to different function depending on if the
| operator selected the weapons, or navigation, or radar, etc.
| functions.
|
| You still had the tactile interface, but you gained the
| flexibility of the dynamic interfaces.
|
| Not sure how well it performed though.
| picture wrote:
| I think that's a pretty common design pattern for
| industrial/reliable applications. Multi Function Displays
| have been common in "glass-cockpit" aircraft for a long time.
| The F16 notably also feature master mode switches on the
| group of buttons below the HUD. It allows the operator to
| quickly switch between air to air, air to ground, dogfight
| modes, etc, bringing up relevant displays and controls at a
| moment's notice. I've heard that pilots consider F16 one of
| the best designed in terms of interface.
|
| Soft buttons are also pretty common for test and measurement
| equipment. I own many modern digital oscilloscopes and
| spectrum analyzers, all of which feature physical buttons
| around the screen that are selected by software to do
| different things
| March_f6 wrote:
| Did I read this article wrong? Are hands a metaphor for
| something? A lot of people can't and/or eventually won't be able
| to use their hands. This was as true in 2011 as it is now.
| sleepydog wrote:
| Are the "pictures under glass" interfaces critiqued in the
| article really any better for those who cannot use their hands?
| I have full use of my hands, so I am not sure, but the few
| people I know with limited hand control use some specialized
| input device that they can operate with their mouth, eyes, or
| head.
| causality0 wrote:
| The war on tactile interfaces is doing incredible amounts of
| harm. Personally my life got perceptible better after I
| 3D-printed mouse buttons and glued them on top of my laptop's
| clickpad.
| nfoz wrote:
| Could you share your model for this? How well does it work?
| I've considered doing the same.
|
| The set of laptops I'm willing to run non-macOS on is limited
| by the set of laptops that have physical touchpad buttons, and
| that's a diminishingly small market segment :(
| causality0 wrote:
| They work quite well. The biggest difference is that they're
| attached to the same plane so the sides of the gap between
| them don't move up and down independently of each other,
| which makes it slightly harder to tell which side is which by
| touch. The pad can still sense your finger through them so it
| knows where you're clicking. I can post the model after I
| return from vacation next week, but you'll have to shape and
| size it for the target touchpad anyway. It's essentially just
| a flat rectangle with a radiused corner that's half the
| length of the touchpad, with a semi-circle in the middle to
| index my finger on. The thickness is 0.6mm for the tallest
| part. This will vary depending on the geometry of the bottom
| edge of your pad. I used silicone glue so it's easily
| removable with no surface damage.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/yQj8TYJ.jpg
| kwatsonafter wrote:
| Does anyone know if it's possible to visit DynamicLand in
| Oakland? Massive Bret Victor fan.
| carapace wrote:
| I think kinematic UI's would at first seem new and fun, but then
| become tedious. Sign language has less bandwidth than speaking or
| typing and expends more calories.
| egypturnash wrote:
| "So here's a vision of the future that's popular right now.
| [video embed, black with the text THIS VIDEO IS PRIVATE]"
|
| I like this vision a whole lot.
| [deleted]
| morley wrote:
| Is there any research into causing flat surfaces to simulate a
| bump while still remaining flat? I think I've read about
| interfaces that can raise or lower some parts for buttons, but it
| would be a lot more convenient to have a glass display where you
| can "feel" the outline of a button electro-chemically without it
| actually being there.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| They do fingerprint reading through the screen on mobile phones
| by using ultrasound; I wonder if you can up the intensity to
| provide a haptic affordance to on-screen 'features' like
| buttons and such.
| munro wrote:
| Great stuff, especially posted to a programming community. I
| wonder if coding a system was more spatial & tactile. I think may
| just make it easier to get back into a project after setting it
| down for a month or more, who knows.
| seltzered_ wrote:
| Title edit request: from 2011
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=a+brief+rant+on+the+future+of+inte...
| dmitriid wrote:
| Doesn't matter if it's from 2011. It's evergreen
| rchaud wrote:
| Except for the Youtube embed shown right at the start of the
| article.
| ghoulishly wrote:
| Mirror of the video if you're interested:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KytMZOLyF4Q
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Perhaps it's the 2011 date that makes it odd, but I think the
| author is picking way too much on dumb marketing commercials,
| when there are countless of companies in the world shipping
| actual products fitting these ideas.
|
| For instance Nintendo has been exploring that space for so long,
| coming up at mass market level with different paradigms to
| interact with their devices. Microsoft has a long history of
| UX/UI research and actual shipped adaptive products, including
| for people with special needs. We're going way past 2011 but
| there is also a ton of research on better haptic feedback and
| ways to make the "R" part of VR more real.
|
| On the other side, I'm sure I'm not alone in disabling most of
| the input haptics and sounds and animations when setting up a new
| phone or laptop. Glass is fine for visual things, and I'm also
| fine with only visual feedback when using hand tracking on the
| Quest2 for instance, and the stuff I am manipulating are menus
| and lists, and I'm fine with no tactile feedback for
| fundamentally virtual concepts.
| bmitc wrote:
| Can you give other examples of countless? You've listed two
| companies, Nintendo with their Switch controllers and Labo and
| Microsoft with things like the Surface Dial, that are some of
| the only companies exploring stuff like that. You make it sound
| like it's ubiquitous when 99% of people interact with the
| digital world through one or two fingers (or a few more with a
| keyboard or a hand with a mouse).
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Google went with squeezing on past phones, Sony put a
| tremendous effort on the trigger mechanism for the PS5, Panic
| playing with the crank handle on the Playdate, to stay on
| very public products. And yes I see a lot more on up to come
| products designed for VR.
|
| I agree 99% of people interact with very shallow feedback,
| and that's I think a reasonable state, 99% of the
| applications we use are effectively shallow and require very
| simple input and only have a basic output (it makes me think
| about the amount of people using no more than 2 or 3 keyboard
| shortcuts for their daily tasks on a desktop computer,
| they're not stressing about getting more from these
| interactions)
|
| PS: I feel silly not mentionning on Apple or Samsung's stylus
| with pressure and angle sensitivity...
| crooked-v wrote:
| Steam's VR controllers and the Steam Deck play with a
| distinction between "touch" and "press" with
| buttons/joysticks, for more intuitive multimodal controls.
| For example, various Steam Deck control schemes have gyro
| aiming, but only while you have thumb touching the stick.
| It's one of those things that's very intuitive in use but
| hard to explain the "why" to somebody who hasn't tried it.
| munificent wrote:
| I think in many ways, you're reinforcing his point. Your
| perspective here is one that doesn't even _consider_ ways of
| interacting beyond touching a flat screen.
|
| When you talk about haptics, you only mention passive haptic
| feedback: annoying bumps, buzzes, and rumbles. You're right
| that those are annoying and mostly useless (though the haptic
| feedback on MacBook Pro trackpads is quite nice).
|
| But that's not what he's talking about _at all_. His whole
| point is that interacting with tool 's _isn 't_ "fundamentally
| virtual". That's a _choice_ that technology has made because
| screens of pixels are so amenable to software control.
|
| If you want to, say, decide which restaurant to eat at, there's
| nothing intrinsically visual or 2D about that. We assume that a
| screen is the only natural way to do that simply because we're
| used to that paradigm, which is _exactly_ the problem he 's
| ranting about.
|
| Imagine a "restaurant tray". It has, I don't know, physical
| sliders and buttons at the top where you can specify what kinds
| of restaurants you're OK with. When you do, a bunch of tokens
| appear on the tray for every potential restaurant. You and your
| party can reach out and grab them. Group a few together as
| potential ones. Sweep the ones no one wants off to the side.
| Maybe let each person take and hold their favorite, or pull
| them over to their side of the tray. Swap and trade them like
| poker chips.
|
| Think about how much more immediate and collaborative that
| process would be for reaching agreement on where to go.
|
| _That 's_ the kind of stuff he's talking about. You might be
| thinking, "Well it would be too hard to build a system that
| creates physical tokens for every possible restaurant." But,
| again, that's a technological problem we'll only solve if we
| have a vision for those kinds of experiences in the first
| place.
|
| If we can't see beyond pixels on screens, we'll never get
| there.
| rchaud wrote:
| > "I call this technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under
| Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our
| hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade."
|
| Anybody remember the 2008 Blackberry Storm, the company's iPhone
| competitor? It had a "clickable" glass panel, to bridge the UX
| gap between the tactile KB BlackBerry phones and the touchscreen-
| only Storm. Touching an icon required tapping the glass panel,
| which had some give, making it feel like a big button.
|
| It was far from a perfect experience. The touch events all
| worked, but I always felt that I was about the break the screen
| with each successive touch.
| pruett wrote:
| Legend
| blenderdt wrote:
| Since this is from 2011 you should take a look at his future of
| interactice design:
|
| https://dynamicland.org/
| Pulcinella wrote:
| I mention it elsewhere, but unfortunately I don't believe
| Dynamicland exists anymore as a physical space.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31531398
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Young interaction designers have been ranting about this for a
| while, but I for one do not want what they think I want. I like
| flat screens and want flat screens, even in VR
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| For perhaps the ultimate example of "pictures under glass",
| contrast this product:
|
| https://www.slatemt.com/
|
| with a traditional mixing console, full of physical objects to
| press, grab, twirl, slide etc.
| smm11 wrote:
| Not totally on topic, but I just bought a new Mac running
| Monterey. I've been running Win 10 and 11, and Ubuntu since 2014
| or so, otherwise.
|
| And the current OS X interface is nauseating. How we had decent
| GUIs when computers were 1/1000th what today's are, and this
| flat, ugly, undefined, pasty BS is acceptable is beyond me.
|
| No joke, I'm returning the M1 machine and will go back to dual-
| boot Win11 and Ubuntu. Sorry, Apple, but you've lost your way.
| twic wrote:
| I suspect this emphasis on tactility is sentimental nonsense. But
| we should definitely give it a serious try to find out!
|
| What i would be much more interested in is eye tracking. I have
| three screens covered in interactivity, but the speed at which i
| can interact with them - which is the speed at which i can
| explore and experiment - is limited by the speed with which i can
| grasp my mouse, then shove it around to position the cursor. I'm
| convinced i could do many things so much more fluidly if the
| machine could see where i was looking at transfer focus there in
| a flash.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| How do you feel about typing on an iPad or iPhone or membrane
| keyboard vs a keyboard with actual keys and switches?
| codalan wrote:
| I don't anticipate replacing my keyboard and mouse with a
| touchscreen for doing software development work.
|
| If it was measurable, I would guess that productivity plummeted
| for most companies that replaced the traditional
| computer/mouse/keyboard with a tablet. I remember going to an
| AT&T store years ago and watching the customer care rep
| struggle to get my information into their system with an iPad.
| A five minute data-entry task on a computer took this person
| almost 20 minutes on their tablet.
| ajdegol wrote:
| It's not sentimental nonsense: it's enactive cognition.
|
| I believe this is a hugely under appreciated capability of
| humans, possibly one of the keys to a type of genius.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > I suspect this emphasis on tactility is sentimental nonsense.
|
| I don't think it's sentimental to think it's undesirable to
| have one of your senses muted.
| a4isms wrote:
| Drive a modern car where everything that used to be a button or
| switch is now hidden behind glass. Wanting the return of
| mechanical controls with tactile feedback is not
| sentimentality, it's usability.
| euroderf wrote:
| This glass-based crap is the most blatant evidence of
| pervasive user interface CHEAPNIS. Yes, bring back buttons...
| and big chunky toggle switches... and especially rocker
| switches <3 Ditch the useless glossy glass crap and the el-
| cheapo membrane buttons that rot out RSN.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Rant: my car (Zafira) has an indicator stem that returns to
| centre when you activate it. Normally they stay offset so
| it's very clear the indicator is on. Pair that with a too
| quiet 'tick' sound and the indicator on the driver's panel
| being hidden behind the steering wheel ... it makes the
| vehicle so frustrating to drive. Argh, HCI is so important.
|
| Also, while I'm here, the steering wheel is adjustable in
| height as in many cars, but I've never seen a vehicle with
| indicator lights on the driver's panel at the top and
| bottom (they're all at the top) so there's always chance
| you can't see them when you adjust the wheel height. I've
| driven a lot of cars as we often hire. Seems like a
| fundamental flaw to me.
| [deleted]
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Speaking of interaction design, nice mechanical switches, how
| fantastic hands are at manipulating things, and The Adams Family
| Thing:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tQq7OTygyg&t=59m35s
|
| >Constructionism2016 Session 16: Plenary 4, Cynthia Solomon
|
| >One of the funny things Marvin Minsky did in his younger days is
| that he spend time with another very famous computerist, Claude
| Shannon.
|
| >And Claude Shannon and Marvin came up with The Most Useless Box
| In The World.
|
| >It, uh, I have a video of somebody... What it is, is um,
| actually, Claude -- Marvin designed it, and Claud built it.
|
| >And it's a box. You turn it on, and a hand comes out and shuts
| it off. It goes back in.
|
| >People don't know, but that's Marvin and Claude Shannon. Claude
| Shannon was the father on information theory. That's what he did.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_machine
|
| >The best-known "useless machines" are those inspired by Marvin
| Minsky's design, in which the device's sole function is to switch
| itself off by operating its own "off" switch. Their popularity
| has recently been raised by commercial success. More elaborate
| devices and some novelty toys, which have a more obvious function
| or entertainment value, have been based on these simple "useless
| machines". [...]
|
| >The version of the useless machine that became famous in
| information theory (basically a box with a simple switch which,
| when turned "on", causes a hand or lever to appear from inside
| the box that switches the machine "off" before disappearing
| inside the box again) appears to have been invented by MIT
| professor and artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky,
| while he was a graduate student at Bell Labs in 1952. Minsky
| dubbed his invention the "ultimate machine", but that sense of
| the term did not catch on. The device has also been called the
| "Leave Me Alone Box".
|
| >Minsky's mentor at Bell Labs, information theory pioneer Claude
| Shannon (who later also became an MIT professor), made his own
| versions of the machine. He kept one on his desk, where science
| fiction author Arthur C. Clarke saw it. Clarke later wrote,
| "There is something unspeakably sinister about a machine that
| does nothing--absolutely nothing--except switch itself off", and
| he was fascinated by the concept.
|
| >Minsky also invented a "gravity machine" that would ring a bell
| if the gravitational constant were to change, a theoretical
| possibility that is not expected to occur in the foreseeable
| future.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw2Bq0HYu1M
|
| >The Ultimate Machine
|
| >Davide Moises (1973-), The Ultimate Machine nach Claude E.
| Shannon, Die Sammlung David Moises, Multimediale Installation,
| 2009 Technisches Museum Wien
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iattYDKp3A
|
| >SMALL moody useless box " leave me alone " box. This useless box
| has an attitude. It has a variety of movements and behaves very
| cute when you shut it off. [...]
| mbesto wrote:
| Surprise there is no mention of the terms: Gorilla Arm and
| Tactile Feedback (haptics).
|
| These are the two reasons the "minority report" style of
| interactive design will never catch on for humans.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haptic_technology
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#%22Gorilla_arm%22
| DANK_YACHT wrote:
| Hands feel and manipulate things because they evolved in a
| physical world where that type of interaction was most efficient.
| The digital world opens up new possibilities that don't need
| physical manipulation to be controlled. It feels a bit luddite to
| restrict interaction just to physical manipulation. I agree,
| sometimes designers go too far, e.g. in the case of touch-screen
| hvac controls in cars. However, there are also examples where
| physical manipulation is not desired. For instance, the
| smartphone is so powerful because it's not tied to one physical
| mode of operation. It can have buttons for a calculator, or a
| keyboard, or serve as a book, or a video game controller, or...
|
| Given that this was written in 2011, I commend the author for
| having an opinion, but it has aged rather like milk to me.
| Dangeranger wrote:
| The author, Bret Victor, put his money where is mouth was and
| founded a tangible computing organization named Dynamic Land[0]
| that is funded in part by the research organization led by Alan
| Kay.
|
| Dynamic Land might be the most interesting approach to
| collaborative computing in person that I've seen to date.
|
| Bret designed the system, wrote the operating system, and the
| libraries used to interact with the OS via physical objects.
| It's awesome.
|
| [0] https://dynamicland.org/
| DANK_YACHT wrote:
| I find Tilt Five[0] to be 100x more interesting than Dynamic
| Land. They don't serve entirely the same purpose, but I think
| it illustrates the difference between clinging to the past
| (Dynamic Land) and embracing a digital future (Tilt Five).
| Both solutions are powered by projectors and sensors, but
| Tilt Five pushes the envelope a lot further than Dynamic
| Land.
|
| [0] https://www.tiltfive.com/
| Dangeranger wrote:
| I'll have a look at this, thank you.
|
| In what ways do you feel like TiltFive supersedes what
| Dynamic Land is doing?
|
| [EDIT]: After reviewing the marketing materials, it looks
| to me that this project is orthogonal to the goals of
| Dynamic Land, and they don't really serve the same purpose.
|
| 1) Dynamic Land is intended to allow for computing by
| interacting with real physical objects, and seeing the
| outputs displayed back in the real world without augmented
| reality hardware.
|
| 2) TiltFive seems intended to allow for holographic display
| of traditional or specialized game content onto physical
| objects. More like advanced AR than tangible or physical
| computing .
| DANK_YACHT wrote:
| I guess my point is that what Dynamic Land is doing is
| not compelling, so there will never be a perfect analog
| to compare it to, unless you compare it to another
| initiative that is also not compelling. Maybe Dynamic
| Land makes a cool demo, but the approach isn't capable of
| producing anything generally interesting. As far as I can
| tell, there have not been any updates on the initiative
| since 2019, so it looks like Dynamic Land might be dead.
| What I find interesting about Tilt Five is that they
| bring computation into the physical space. It might not
| be tactile, but it's at least usable for something.
| Another comparison to Dynamic Land is that Dynamic Land
| tries to create computation in one shared environment.
| Tilt Five, on the other hand, allows two people in
| separate physical environments to share a digital
| environment. These are just two examples of how a
| digital-first approach is more compelling than Dynamic
| Land's analog-first approach.
| bmitc wrote:
| > I guess my point is that what Dynamic Land is doing is
| not compelling
|
| Have you used it? My gut feeling is that Dynamicland is
| likely something that has to be experienced to be
| understood. I saw Bret Victor present on Dynamicland at a
| design conference, and there are tons of little happy and
| unexpected accidents that come from people using it and
| experiencing it. It's stuff that you can't throw into
| bullet points.
| nullstyle wrote:
| Conversely, I find Tilt Five to be nowhere near as
| interesting to me as Dynamic Land. Tilt Five doesn't push
| the envelope on computing further as far as I can see, but
| rather is just an expensive game peripheral for windows and
| android phones; Dynamic land is attempting to develop and
| enable new forms of media, especially communal media. The
| two projects shouldn't be held in the same breath IMO.
|
| Besides, the Tilt Five developer program YouTube
| commercial[1] is the worst. It's like an xbox 360 reveal
| video at CES or a Qualcomm presentation about digital
| natives.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-7lHqyBQeg
| bowsamic wrote:
| The question should be, can we have a device with a
| programmable real-time tactile environment?
| munificent wrote:
| _> For instance, the smartphone is so powerful because it 's
| not tied to one physical mode of operation. It can have buttons
| for a calculator, or a keyboard, or serve as a book, or a video
| game controller, or..._
|
| Smartphones are powerful because the interface is
| reconfigurable in software. That's orthogonal to whether the
| interface is tactile or not.
|
| Imagine you go to choose between two smartphones:
|
| 1. One is like you have today: a flat surface of glass with
| colored pixels underneath.
|
| 2. The other supports a surface that physically changes in
| response to the application. Open the calculator, and a grid of
| number buttons appear. Tapping one gives the satisfying click
| of an old calculator. Switch to a synthesizer and a row of
| piano keys appear. The have the bounce of a weighted piano and
| play louder or softer based on how hard you press them. Open a
| game and a D-pad and joystick materialize.
|
| I know which one I'd pick.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Our computer interactions could be so much richer if we allowed
| computers to observe and listen to us and our surroundings
| continuously. They would learn faster, and have the full context
| of everything we say or ask for or point at or do.
|
| But we don't allow that, because we are (rightly) worried that
| doing so would give all our private and sensitive personal
| information to greedy companies and invasive governments.
|
| The future of computer interaction depends not on better hardware
| or algorithms, it depends on trust. And discretion. Solve those
| problems and you will unlock huge potential.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| They do such a bad job with the context they currently have,
| that I can't see adding more context doing anything other than
| confusing them.
| natly wrote:
| I wish more people experimented with hand input since this has
| essentially been solved in recent years due to advancements in
| computer vision: https://mediapipe.dev/. Yeah it might be awkward
| to ask the user to activate their camera, etc etc. But right now
| I'm barely seeing any experimentation in this direction which is
| a shame.
|
| Part of me wonders if it's just that people don't know that this
| is solved on the web, so make sure to go here and try it out and
| make something if Brets article appealed to you:
| https://google.github.io/mediapipe/solutions/hands#javascrip... +
| https://codepen.io/mediapipe/pen/RwGWYJw
| raihansaputra wrote:
| I think one way this can be more acceptable is to redirect the
| camera to view the hands above the keyboard instead of having
| to wave my hands in front of my face. Interesting to be able to
| enable gestures to swipe desktops without using the trackpad.
| elefantastisch wrote:
| Asking for camera access is not "awkward". In 2022, it's
| assumed that if I say yes, you'll record absolutely everything
| the camera can see, store it forever, sell it to anyone who
| wants it, and use it to show me ads for crap no one wants.
| There are a whole host of amazing possible apps using camera,
| location, microphone, etc., but tech companies have proven that
| they cannot or will not deliver these apps without egregious
| privacy violations.
|
| Tech companies need to prove they can limit themselves to using
| data for the purpose for which it was requested, then we can
| talk about whether or not I'll give camera access.
| woojoo666 wrote:
| The LeapMotion was basically a really accurate Kinect for your
| hands, and that was back in 2014. I always wondered why it
| never took off, and I suspect it's a market issue more than a
| technological one. Waving your hand in the air and doing hand
| gestures just didn't provide enough benefit I guess
| natly wrote:
| I really wanted to play with it but never did because I had
| to buy a whole thing (that I might only use once and there
| wasn't many people developing for). With it being available
| on the web (without a device) things might be different since
| the the bar to try it out is much lowered. (After all oculus
| has tons of fun games and things that use hand tracking so I
| don't think you can conclude the idea doesn't have
| potential.)
| novirium wrote:
| I had one of the LeapMotion input devices back around when
| they launched, and really did try to use it in earnest -
| using a whole bunch of shortcuts and AutoHotkey hacks to
| navigate the OS with it. There were even experimental
| programs people wrote to input text with it, using something
| similar to chorded keyboards.
|
| It didn't really work out though. Long story short: my arms
| got tired. Turns out that it's a kinda fundamental problem
| with how they had designed the interface - hovering your
| hands above something for extended periods of time is simply
| just tiring and uncomfortable.
| DanHulton wrote:
| That seemed pretty obvious the first time I saw it, but I
| figured maybe I was over-estimating the issue. I mean,
| here's this darling company with a product everyone's
| excited about. Surely they must have thought about that!
|
| I guess they did not think about that.
| woojoo666 wrote:
| Oh definitely, it just goes to show that a lot of the sci
| fi gesture-based interfaces just aren't very practical
| throwaway-jim wrote:
| 404
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _A brief rant on the future of interaction design (2011)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21116948 - Sept 2019 (153
| comments)
|
| _A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design (2011)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6325996 - Sept 2013 (35
| comments)
|
| _A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3212949 - Nov 2011 (150
| comments)
| pvsnp wrote:
| I was wondering why this sounded familiar and it's from 2011.
| Here are various things that have been invented along the same
| lines as Bret mentions.
|
| * https://dynamicland.org/ - Bret Victor's vision, looks really
| cool * Kinect was released (November 4, 2010) a little before
| this article and presented another vision of future, but the
| market didn't think so * Oculus now detects hands and I'm pretty
| hopeful this will add more gestures and similar gait detection
| will be huge for interfaces
|
| All in all, the incremental changes are starting to look more
| like what Bret is suggesting rather than purely "pane of glass"
| mcphage wrote:
| > Kinect was released (November 4, 2010) a little before this
| article and presented another vision of future, but the market
| didn't think so
|
| The Kinect has pretty much dried up for video games, but the
| company that developed the first version of the Kinect for
| Microsoft was later purchased by Apple, and their technology
| underpins the FaceID tech that appears in every iOS device
| these days.
|
| (Apple has also had rear-facing Lidar on their iPads & iPhones
| for a few years now, and I _believe_ that it is also an
| evolution of the Kinect tech, but I don 't know for sure.)
|
| I am disappointed that it withered away for video games, since
| it was really interesting & fun technology.
| Dangeranger wrote:
| Two things about Dynamic Land that I love.
|
| 1) Bret brought the computer into the world, instead of
| bringing the world into the computer, e.g. Oculus or Vive.
|
| 2) The operating system that senses the world and reads
| instructions from objects is influenced by Smalltalk, and from
| what I understand allows for Smalltalk like programs to run on
| it in the form of object instructions and interactions.
| mlajtos wrote:
| Ad 2, why do you think Realtalk has any resemblance to
| Smalltalk?
|
| https://colelawrence.com/posts/2018-12-06-distribution-
| model...
| Pulcinella wrote:
| Unfortunately I think Dynamicland is dead. The physical space
| in Oakland doesn't exist anymore. It sounds like only Bret
| Victor and maybe one other person are left and Victor is
| relocating to a university Biology lab to try to implement his
| ideas there.
|
| Source: Andy Matuschak mentions it in
| https://www.notion.so/blog/andy-matuschak
|
| _One thing which comes to mind is that Dynamicland is a
| strange laboratory. It was a space in Oakland that is no more,
| but it 's a physical environment where the primary activity
| being undertaken was creating this very unusual computing
| system._
|
| ...
|
| _And in fact, that 's exactly what the principal investigator
| is doing right now. He's picking up and relocating the work to
| very interesting synthetic biology lab, where maybe now that
| the further development of the system will happen in a way
| that's meant to support this professor's research._
| elil17 wrote:
| I'm a mechanical engineer and my favorite way to interact with my
| computer is with my SpaceMouse [1], a sort of joy-stick that you
| can pull or rotate in any direction to drag, spin, and scale 3D
| models. You can also use it to fly around Excel spreadsheets or
| scroll through web pages.
|
| One thing that I love about it is the grip I can use - it's the
| "precision" grip that the author discusses in the article, and it
| gives me a lot of fine control over what I'm doing.
|
| The other day, I saw the haptic smart knob on Hackaday [2]. It's
| a force feedback rotating knob with software defined detents and
| boundaries.
|
| If someone could combine the SpaceMouse with the smart knob, I
| think the resulting multiple DOF force feedback controller might
| just be the input device of the future.
|
| [1]: https://3dconnexion.com/uk/product/spacemouse-compact/ [2]:
| https://hackaday.com/2022/03/13/haptic-smart-knob-does-sever...
| z_zetetic_z wrote:
| Can you use the space mouse in 3 games? That would be cool!
|
| I don't do cad work, but I'm tempted to get a SpaceMouse for
| the sheer coolness factor.
| elil17 wrote:
| I believe someone has rigged one up to work with Elite
| Dangerous. There is no broad support, however. I would love
| to see a game designed specifically for the SpaceMouse
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| A tree of code scopes is a graph, and you have one per module,
| plus a navigation history, which makes it 3d, even 4.
|
| A device like that could be adapted for dev.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'm curious as to whether or not anyone has any comments on
| that wild Microsoft Surface "mouse," or "knob," or "dial," or
| whatever.
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/surface-dial/925r551sktgn
| ckz wrote:
| I own one!
|
| I'm a UI/UX designer who was historically very invested in
| the Surface ecosystem during the early Win8/10 era, so this
| was a day-1 curiosity purchase for me.
|
| As a physical object, I like it a lot. It's not _perfect_,
| but it has a great weight, the Dial has a satisfying
| resistance (like a 70s stereo knob), uses AAAs, and the
| haptic feedback is solid for a digitally-triggered vibrating
| motor (vs a literal ratchet).
|
| What I find, however, is that it's a superior consumption
| tool vs creation tool. It's at its best when being used as a
| single-function knob. Great for sitting at a desk while
| reading a whitepaper, or perhaps controlling volume while
| listening to music. Day to day I use a mouse with a stepped-
| wheel, but the smooth scroll on the Dial makes it my
| preferred way to handle longform content. Keeps a long
| article flowing.
|
| However, it has not become an indispensable part of my
| workflow. That may just be me. I need to pivot between
| Windows/macOS/Linux over the course of a day, so a lot of its
| proprietary-tech promise is wasted and I've built fewer
| habits. I'm also not sure offhand how good the integration is
| with design tools after the initial fanfare around Adobe,
| Surface Studio, etc.
|
| Other tricky part: It's bluetooth. Once it's awake and in-
| use, that's...acceptable, if you aren't actively looking for
| tiny bits of input lag. But if you need it on-demand (sudden
| noise from the speakers, etc.) and you haven't used it in a
| while, it may be a couple seconds before it's responsive to
| that first input.
|
| Still, it _is_ intriguing enough to me that years-on, it's
| still on my desk and is one of the only bluetooth devices I
| own, much less tolerate using. I think it's at it's best when
| it's a context-sensitive linear actuator with some light
| multifunction capability vs a new paradigm.
| iratewizard wrote:
| I was going to write you off as one of those weird trackball
| people, but then I dug into the mouse. It does look like a
| useful tool for CAD in conjunction with a normal mouse
| elil17 wrote:
| Perhaps weird, definitely not a trackball person!
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| Not only that. Nothing beats flying through Google Earth with
| a SpaceMouse!
| sleepydog wrote:
| I believe there was one of these, or a device very much
| like it, in Google's headquarters in mountain view, as part
| of a wrap-around google earth display that lets you zoom
| around 3d space.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Definitely. In Google Earth Pro there are a few settings to
| tweak in the Navigation options. Turn on Enable Controller,
| of course, and turn OFF Reverse Controls and Enable
| Visualization.
|
| I also like to turn on "Do not automatically tilt while
| zooming". I don't recall if that affects SpaceMouse, but I
| don't like the default automatic tilt when using regular
| mouse or keyboard navigation.
|
| Also if you are using a ThinkPad, be sure to try each of
| the three mouse buttons (hold one down and move the
| TrackPoint around) when not using the SpaceMouse.
| munificent wrote:
| Way back in 1996 at Siggraph, I tried out a "haptic pen". It
| was a little pen on the end of an articulated robot arm. You
| held it like a normal pen and moved it around in 3D space. The
| robot arm would give you force feedback based on where the tip
| was in space. It was strong enough to completely stop the pen.
|
| In the demo they had set up, there was a 3D model of a car, and
| you slide the tip of the pen along the surface. The haptic
| feedback would stop the pen from penetrating into the model so
| it really felt like the tip was touching the volume of a solid.
|
| Super cool experience.
| javiramos wrote:
| Sensable Technologies, an MIT spinout, developed the
| technology. The company was acquired by 3D Systems
| (https://www.3dsystems.com/haptics)
|
| Note that Thomas Massie, US representative and climate change
| denialist, was the founder of Senseable.
| mepian wrote:
| Sounds like the perfect sculpting experience if you combine
| it with modern VR.
| munificent wrote:
| Yeah, 3D modeling was the use case they were demoing it
| for. It was really impressive.
| gmueckl wrote:
| Was this pen on an arm later commercialized as the Phantom
| Omni?
| munificent wrote:
| I have no idea. This was a quarter century ago. :D
| Findecanor wrote:
| Sounds like it. I worked for a few months building demos
| for the "SensAble Phantom" (not Omni).
|
| It was limited in that it gave force-feedback only against
| the sphere at the tip. The orientation of the pen could not
| be restricted. We attempted to simulate feedback on more
| DOF through leverage, but it was lacking: like using a
| mouse to simulate a steering wheel in a driving game.
| jkestner wrote:
| The SpaceMouse is a great piece of interaction
| design/mechanical engineering; makes CAD much less painful.
| (Never tried it on a spreadsheet!) The key is the mechanical
| springs in it which provide just a bit of resistance without
| impeding precise control. It has a bit of a learning curve,
| kinda like when Macs reversed the finger scroll gesture on
| trackpads, but then it becomes part of my left hand while my
| right hand mans the mouse.
| elil17 wrote:
| Honestly I did not find the learning curve that bad. It took
| me about 15 minutes to get as fast with the SpaceMouse as I
| am with a regular mouse. However the skill ceiling is high
| and there's a lot of potential to get really good with it.
| zwieback wrote:
| Back in the day at hp we had "knob boxes" for the then
| relatively new 3D CAD systems. Some MEs loved them, others did
| not.
|
| Here's what they looked like:
| http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=684
| Findecanor wrote:
| Knob boxes have had a comeback, for controlling photo values
| in Lightroom.
|
| There are plugins for using generic MIDI controllers (for
| musical instruments) that have knobs, sliders and buttons.
| Then there are also dedicated controllers that do basically
| the same thing, but with specialised labels on the controls.
| seltzered_ wrote:
| While we're talking about HP, it's also worth noting the HP
| Sprout PC they tried from 2014-2017 that facilitated
| projecting (and then 2d/3d scanning content) on a 'touchmat':
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprout_(computer) ,
| https://youtu.be/GZMeY8leQBM?t=137
| zwieback wrote:
| The best part of Sprout was the "turntable", which allows
| auto-positioning an object at various angles relative to
| the structured-light 3D camera. I was able to snag a couple
| and use them with our other 3D acquisition systems.
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