Digital ecology

I've spent most of today getting the cloud back into running order and showing some natural laguage people round. While doing that I've been thinking about some kind of future interface. I met up with T. and told him the interface is like a word on the tip of your tongue. Nearly there but you can't say it.

How did it start - talking about putting an interface on the Surface where if you put your IPhone on it the Iphone interface would 'spill its guts' on to the Surface letting you have more interface time and space. Like a full sized if virtual keyboard.
I wondered if you placed two Phones each running photos or calendars what would happen?
What would happen if you placed your phone next to your iMac the machines would notice each other and  communicate ( T mentioned the next generation iPhone would have an RFID tag) . How would your Laptop then expand the interface ?

So how would the interface work ? I like the idea of an intelligent layout manager and interface definition which would let you expand the iPhone/Android sized  app on to the bigger screens. It might be simpler to store multiple layouts too ( as Paul suggests). I like the idea of having resolution in the layout description allowing you  to specify what should go when the interface is reduced.

I'm thinking we need a  whole new GUI/OS something that would support the notion of 'user',  mutli-treading in the rendering layer,  a cloud based model, seeing things like the Microsoft 2020 vision I'm thinking it would be good to have animation based at the lowest level.

Microsft reinvent ZUI and lots of other things from 20 years ago.

Came across this link to a Microsoft demo.

• Naturally there are bits I like and bits I don't.
• So pen input - fairly normal even the mac has stroke to text.
• The zoomable interface I like a lot but I would say that wouldn't I?
• I like the notion of zoom able searching ( get more back)
• The selection through eye tracking is again fairly old ( cute how the guy writing the blog is fairly excited by this). The big problem is that the eye cascades over the interface quite quickly. If something on the screen moves ( like the animated icon opening ) then you get the eye moving toward it. It must take a lot of blinkered self control to do this part of the demo.Given your motor vision and the eye movement are separate why not just let it grow under the finger/mouse.
• Speech recognition -again fairly old - I saw this in 1994? this has the same problem as any command line interface, you have to remember the command.
• Now you could use eye tracking as part of the emotion interface (the machine sees what are you looking at - why not start to load plain links before you look at them?) . Its also useful for the computer to know if you are looking at it ( use a audible alert to get your attention if your not).
• I do like the flexible interfaces and the glass interface.
• the gesturing looks fu. Again your don't want to do this more than occasionally with out getting gorilla arms ( remember I did VR research )

zoomable is back

Zoomorama is a wonderful flash implementation of my Amazon code I wrote a few years ago. Go flash. I'm glad they came up with a way of exploiting a zoom able interface. Nice. 

Zoomable is back

http://www.zoomify.com/

http://gasi.ch/blog/flex-multiscaleimage-component/

And deep zoom a microsoft image file format.