[ExI] Very Cool Kinect Application

[Kelly Anderson]

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 4:34 AM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
> Love the little sandbox. I want to play. Or have a sand-based user
> interface.

I bet Seymour Papert would have fun with this... :-)

> On 09/05/2012 05:39, Kelly Anderson wrote:
>> Anyway, it makes me think of the quote that a mouse, keyboard and
>> screen are an awful narrow straw through which to view the world. It's
>> gonna get fun people!
>
> Yup. I am at a biometrics workshop right now, and I think we are going to
> see a lot of more interesting sensors/senses of our devices. This is both
> good news and bad news to the biometrics people: more uses for their
> algorithms, but also less control over whether applications are going to be
> secure and privacy protecting. But conversely, the biometrics also helps
> make the new sensors even more useful and hence widespread.

Do you really need the number of steps taken in your Nike shoes to be
private? The folks who turn every aspect of their lives into data (I
went pee 5 times today! @kellypeed) and tweet it all are kinda nuts,
or are they? Maybe it's the rest of us that are nuts?

> Still, the ergonomics of boring desktops is well understood and we can take
> steps to avoid wearout. This might be much trickier in richer interfaces -

It is clearly more difficult to program a good NUI interface than a
GUI interface. Nobody has yet come up with anything resembling a
development environment for this kind of interface other than the very
low level. It reminds me of the time that we had to create our own GUI
for an image processing board... had to draw the menus and buttons
ourselves on that one... Everyone is dealing with the NUI at that
level now. I think there is opportunity to make it easier, but it is
inherently more difficult. It seems that it might be inherently more
difficult to learn too, but clever people will make it easy. The
problem being that there is a shortage of clever user interface
designers out there, so a lot of the NUIs will be junk, harder to use
than the mouse and keyboard they replace in most cases, at least to
begin with.

> while they might be more variable over time and tuned to the user, it is not
> uncommon for people to invent ways of working that are profoundly
> unergonomic.

Clearly this is the case. Perhaps even worse than unergonomic is the
incomprehensible. I remember once Micheal Jackson created this really
fancy web site with Flash or something, and you just could not figure
out how to operate it. It was very creative, just a bit TOO creative.
NUI designers will have a challenge with this aspect of things. It's
too early for standardization of NUIs, too new, but eventually we'll
get there at least to some extent.

-Kelly