Geek Brief TV #411

GBTV Innovation Week continues and Brief 411 is all about HID. Human
Interface Design is all about improving how people interact with
machines.

Mice and keyboards have been useful Human Interface Devices, but there seems to be a common longing for something more natural. When we
saw Tom Cruise moving images around with gestures in the movie Minority Report [1], lots of us wanted to be able to do the same thing. At the TED conference in 2006, Jeff Han showed us we could [2]. Multi-touch is now accessible in iPhones and kind of accessible, depending on where you live, in the Microsoft Surface.

We want electronic devices to understand speech. It's a massive
challenge and researchers have moved us a long way, but not nearly
close enough. Dealing with speech recognition engines via customer
service 800 numbers works a lot of the time, but it's the frustrating
times that stand out in my memory.

Air touch is my term for multi-touch-like navigation that uses cameras or sensors to monitor gestures rather than contact with a screen. HRP.com [3] wowed us a while back with a Web site that uses a visitor's Web cam for navigation. It isn't perfect, but it's a start.

Cam Trax Technologies [4] is writing software to take advantage of
Web cams for navigation in games and other applications.

The ultimate goal in Human Interface Design has to be brain control. We want to be able to think something and watch it happen on
the screen. The first company that will bring a mass-market way to do
it is Emotiv. Their Emotiv EPOC headset [5] reads brain waves and
translates them into action on a computer. The headset will sell for
under $300.

Links:
------
[1]
http://www.amazon.com/Minority-Report-Widescreen-Two-Disc-Special/dp/B00005JL...
[2]
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_touchscree...
[3] http://www.hrp.com/
[4] http://www.camtraxtechnologies.com/
[5] http://emotiv.com/

Category:

Science & Technology

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[kingryanarthur]

:) Very cool! Thanks for the brief! I too couldn't sleep for days when I first saw the TED presentation on multitouch. I had been thinking of having a product like Microsoft's Surface and several years later, BAM there it was! Very cool that there's often many people with the same idea that eventually comes to market.

[AstrotoySeven]

cali, causer of erections, is amongst us again ;)