With Google’s announcement of a possible project Glass release later this year, it looks like we’re genuinely on the cusp of a phase-shift away from the familiar Cartesian-pointer/photographic model of HCI, and into an age of immersive augmented reality in the everyday.
Now I’m as enthusiastic as the next man about the prospect of a world without keyboards, but alternative interfaces like Glass, Kinekt and Siri aren’t without their own intrinsic user experience problems, which could in turn have some interesting cultural effects.
“Natural UI” (today this effectively means Microsoft Kinekt), consumerised as game technology, has already been hacked into service from medicine to AI, and it’s likely that in the future some kind of natural UI based on a combination of spacial sensing, voice input and HUD would be a good basis for wearable, almost passive, mobile HCI.
But given that “hands-free” mobile users still mostly find it necessary to hold their phone handset in conspicuous sight (as a demonstration of sanity), are we really ready to take the plunge and add inexplicable physical gestures into the mix?
Maybe because I’m British, I’m naturally a little horrified at the concept of swiping, swatting and barking my way through a virtual world visible only in my mind. In order for this to be acceptable, I need a recognisable mechanism to differentiate myself - whose unprompted verbal outbursts and uncontrollable arm movements represent negotiation of a sophisticated augmented reality - from those passersby of comparable demeanour which is more likely the result of psychiatric problems or drug misuse.
What’s required is a visible proxy, equivalent to holding my phone in plain view. Closed-loop systems like g-speak, heirs to the vocabulary of VR, use a wearable sensor-array (typically a glove) to provide spatial data to the interface, and this neatly bypasses the problem of recognition. But in the same way as the iphone case gives our identikit mobile phone a subtle identity of its own, the desire for individuality and cultural alignment would cut through into our wearable UI, even more pertinently in this scenario since the glove becomes a constant part of our wardrobe.
With Kinekt-type systems though, which measure gestures of the human form and in which our hands are left naked, will we still require a token to display our intent? And what will it look like?
daveyclayton posted this