Someone interested in the history of of User Interface (UI) will also know that the history on that front has not been quite so dramatic. From the first popular consumer mouse in 1984 to the present day, very little has changed about how we use computers. Mouse and keyboard, windows and icons – up until about 2007, when people started to get excited about NUI.

What NUI is depends on who you ask. People like Microsoft’s Chief research and Strategy officer, think that NUI means doing away with the mouse and keyboard entirely. Instead we should be doing all our computing with a tap of the finger or a gesture of the hand. Not to mention Steve Jobs’ claim that if you have to include a pen in an interface, you’ve screwed up.

While this enthusiasm for futuristic interfaces and simplicity of design is commendable, it ignores the fact that the mouse and keyboard are themselves pretty cool. The speed of input on a keyboard leaves writing, text-to-speech and neat alternatives like Dasher in the dust. The mouse is an incredibly accurate pointing device – one that may be wasted on the majority of computing tasks, but indispensable for CAD and other realms where exactness is more important than fluidity.

The problem with the over-enthusiasm to ditch the old and embrace the new and super-simplified is that it rings hollow to anyone who knows where the old fits best. If you tell a typist that speech recognition is the way of the future, they’ll know that you’re wrong on that point – and consequently will be suspicious of claims in other realms they have less expertise in. Promising that NUI will overturn everything in computing, rather than just where our current solutions need work, threatens to turn people off of the whole thing.

That’s why voices like Bill Buxton’s are so important. In a video interview this year, he said he doesn’t even like the term NUI, let alone the suggestion that it will replace everything. Take the time to watch the video, it grounds the conversation about what comes next in something a little more useful, while still being optimistic about what can happen.  I like his term “Appropriate User Interface”, because 1. it’s less dramatic and 2. it provides a reminder that the application -as in where an interface is applied – is more important than the amazingness of the new- or recently-fangled technology we have available.

Aside from the hilarity at 10:50 when he freaks the presenter out by standing way too close, I was really intrigued by the idea of using distance-aware displays to dynamically scale things up or down depending on how far away you are. I knocked together a Flash-based experiment to that effect. Have a look at it below!

the closer your monitor is to your webcam the better, but it’s an interesting experience having the size of an image remain the same relative to your distance from the screen! It give the impression, like Johnny Chung Lee’s experimnts, of turning the screen into a window through which you just see another world, rather than just a picture. I’m very interested in how this will feel built ino a more robust framework.

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

I’m not sure whether this is re-creating functionality that other people have already put into papervision, but it was a lot of fun! There are some issues with shaded materials, but so far I have bitmap- and colour materials displaying and it’s looking good.  You can try it for yourself!  Like the pale text says – click in the window to add a vertex, press space to close the shape.  It seems to work even on pretty low-powered machines, so give it a try!

A lot of these guys have flickr accounts that show off some of their more entertaining screenshots as well, so I browsed through them too – it’s equal parts amusing and disturbing that the straight-up photography that we do*  ends up so strikingly similar – the sun at a certain angle, a piece of bark which must have looked spectacular at the time but looking somewhat nondescript on screen. I think there are some recurring images and patterns that we just like.

Anyway, I digress.  On Quasimondo I found a fantastic and reasonably lightweight face detection library.  I’ve been hankering after one of these for years.  I tried it, and it works reasonably well – better than I would expect in flash, certainly. This must be the lib that oaxoa used in his Rorshach mask – Mr. Doob too.  They both applied a large opaque decal on top of the face region, which looks great.  I wanted to try something different though, so I started to think about what you could use this face data for.    It might be possible to get some Johnny Lee stuff happening – I’ll need to play around with it a little more to decide if it can hold up to that – but what I ended up with is a 3d variant of Worm or Chopper or whatever you want to call it.  Here’s how to play:

Navigate through the space and collect as many of the tokens as you can – They were going to be carrots, and I started going down that road before realizing it was something of a Maxi-min, so they’re stuck as orangey-red triangular pyramids.  Here goes!

It’s not the smoothest of interfaces, but I’m sure it can be improved upon, even if I have to drop Flash for something more robust.  I recently noticed that the NeHe openGL resources are still being maintained, which is extremely tempting – especially since working in FlashDevelop has made me much more comfortable  with Visual Studio and “Real Programming”, although Ian has tempted me greatly with the promise of a genuine visual programming environment in Quartz Composer. We’ll have to see once I get some real downtime.

What do you think?  What would you do with this new face-detecting superpower?  I’d love to know!

* I consider myself part of this fraternity of flash dabblers, or would at least like to join them in due course.  I must learn their secret handshake!