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User Interfaces
Technology Analyst: Michael Gold
Phone: +1-650-859-6354
Fax: +1-650-859-4544 |
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Viewpoints
About This Technology
User interfaces are the links between users and technologies. They mediate people's relationships with computers, cars, entertainment electronics, office automation, technology in public space, and—especially—handheld devices, whose small screens and buttons limit the set of possible applications. UIs even define people's relationships with technology, especially when elegant user interfaces inspire loyalty—as in the cases of Apple's iPod and TiVo's video recorders. Conversely, challenging UIs discourage technology growth when people have trouble using gadgets—as in the cases of navigating menus to configure a cell phone's Bluetooth connection and setting up remote access to files stored on a home PC. Business decision makers and their customers are increasingly interested in improving the quality of experience when using technology to communicate, be productive, and so on. Some businesses are interested in the promise of very advanced user interfaces such as gesture recognizers, virtual worlds such as Second Life, holographic projectors, and speech-recognition and -synthesis systems that support humanlike conversation quality. Other businesses aim to improve use of evolutionary technologies by taking advantage of state-of-the-art usability-engineering and design methodologies. Such practices rely on feedback from users, who become highly integrated into the design effort—or even cocreators of the final product. UIs—which people sometimes called human-machine interfaces, human-computer interfaces, and other names—first came into many people's awareness when graphical user interfaces emerged for computers (such as Macintosh and Windows PCs) in the 1980s. GUIs made it possible for people without a computer-science background to take advantage of information technology. Good usability, attractive industrial design, and innovative user-experience engineering promise to enable further breakthroughs in market development for handheld devices, connected homes, connected cars, connected workplaces, and smart spaces in public venues such as cinemas, arcades, and mass-transit stations.
The discipline of user-interface engineering covers a wide array of activities, from basic research to practical Web-page design. Developments entail core technologies—such as sensors, actuators, control surfaces, and display devices—as well as highly integrated systems such as cars, aircraft, consumer goods, public-information kiosks, and, of course, everything that an electronics store sells. Services, too, have user interfaces, often consisting of Web sites, call centers with interactive-voice-response and speech-recognition systems, interactive TV menus, and other digital innovations. Even a company's brand is sometimes associated with a distinctive and recognizable look and feel, as in the cases of Apple, Microsoft, and Sony. A number of advanced-user-interface technologies are on the horizon. The social environment of the Internet—which people sometimes call Web 2.0—may be evolving toward a shared virtual 3-D world along the lines of Second Life—a development that one might call Web 3.0. Shared 3-D worlds are the most current instance of the promised ideal of virtual reality—which would accurately simulate the experience of being in an imaginary environment. True VR systems typically include body sensors and head-mounted displays or special rooms containing multiple high-definition displays that show images of an environment that responds to the user's movements. But users have been disappointed in the reality of uncomfortable goggles and gloves, in combination with less-than-realistic graphics and very high prices. Similarly, science-fiction stories often tell of holographic images projected into free space—but the real-world price and performance of stereoscopic displays and virtual-image projectors do not match the science-fiction fantasy. Some researchers now focus on improving performance and lowering the cost of near-eye displays and displays that convey a sense of three-dimensional parallax. However, in reality, technology remains a long way from satisfying the human desire to escape from our flawed world into a virtual world that is solely for our enjoyment.
Instead, developments like the iPod, TiVo, and the 3-D Web illustrate the importance of simply improving design practices to catch up with what technology already enables. Consider Google Maps, which popularized zoomable satellite images that contain annotated street names. Such context-sensitive annotated information—people sometimes call it augmented reality—also appears on some car navigation systems and could increasingly appear on cell phones and future near-eye displays. Users may also increase their use of zoomable interfaces—say, zooming in on an image that represents on-the-job workflow and zooming out to see all concurrent work-related projects in a matrix. With the rise in enthusiasm for Web 3.0, expect companies increasingly to implement 3-D user interfaces for 2-D displays on computers and home-theater products, taking advantage of users' familiarity with navigating virtual worlds in video games and based on exploiting the economies of scale in 3-D chips and software. But user-interface innovations will not stop with Web 3.0's 3-D images on a 2-D screen. R&D labs are busy developing stereoscopic displays and free-space holograms that may require years to arrive in homes but will find initial use in retail environments and other public venues that draw attention to consumer-product promotions and high-ticket items like cars. Labs are also working to enable near-eye displays built into eyeglasses to become practical and affordable. And advanced research aims to create speech interfaces that resemble holding a real conversation with a human. Meanwhile, expect increasing use of speech recognition in everyday applications like voice mail and improvements in natural-speech generation (synthesis or sample splicing). And above all, expect inventors to produce unexpected innovations, such as HyperSonic Sound, a directed-sound technology that reportedly creates the illusion of beaming a voice directly into a user's brain. Another example of radical innovation: the Pick and Drop user interface demonstrated by Sony, which lets users cause an image to be projected on a screen by using a stylus first to point at the image on a handheld device and then to "drop" it onto a screen, or move a file from one device to another by using the stylus to "pick it up" virtually from one device, and "drop it" onto another device.
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