"GML is an extensible markup language used to define gestures that describe interactive object behavior and the relationships between objects in an application. Gesture Markup Language has been designed to enhance the development of multiuser multi-touch and other HCI device driven applications." -Gesture ML Wiki
Photo credit: Ideum RELATED Ideum Blog OpenExhibitsFree multitouch and multiuser software initiative for museums, education, nonprofits, and students GestureWorks Multi-touch authoring for Windows 8 & Windows 7
I came across one of my old posts while putting together More Tablets, More Mobile, More Social. On The Media's The Facebook Show, Adobe's Social 'Metrics, Not Myths" Campaign. When I wrote the following post in December of 2009, the first iPad had not been released. Google Plus was just a rumor. Facebook was much smaller, worldwide. Even though many things have changed, the post rings true: From a Post-Wimp Perspective: What Happens When Post-Mass Market Goes to Market? Bob Garfield's insightful video, and more...
I realize that working for the public good has prevented me from developing a thirst for marketing competitiveness. I don't have a greedy bone in my body. The only reason that I've developed a slight interest in advertising and marketing over the past few years is my interest in technology and how our society has been transformed by recent changes. Everyone has a cell phone, everyone wants an iPhone, everyone expects that technology will help us to meet our social, political, financial, health, education, environmental, and humanitarian needs, right?
What is happening to our "mainstream" cornerstones?
By mainstream, I mean traditional newspapers, magazines, network television, cable, and brochure-like websites. All of a sudden, reporters are running to take graduate classes in multi-media journalism, a domain previously "owned" by network TV 10-15 years ago. Newspapers and magazines are now web-based, your favorite radio and television program have their own websites, and just about every one is on MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter.
The Web is easily accessed, ubiquitous, running on SmartPhones and iPhones, netbooks, and now, e-readers, right from your pocket, purse, or bag.
Ten years ago, if you had a job coding for a tech company, there wasn't an expectation that you'd have to hone your writing skills to maintain a blog, and learn how to produce short video clips to promote your work and the work of your company. If you preferred NOT to be open and social, it was fine! Now, you are probably just holding on. Maybe.
What inspired this post is a video of a presentation by Bob Garfield, an ad critic and essayist for Advertising Age. a magazine I interact with online. He is the co-host of NPR's On The Media program, and has a lot of insight regarding advertising trends and so forth. He is also hilarious. If you are viewing this in a family setting, know that Mr. Garfield uses a few "bad" words and quite a number of data and financial statistics to make his point. No traditional media institution is untouched. An eye opener. Worth every 34+ minute!
"Bob Garfield...forcasts the disintegration of mass advertising structures that have worked in perfect symbiosis for 400 years and prescribes "listenomics" as the way for brands to thrive in the digital, post-advertising age. He warns that all formerly top-down institutions cannot dictate to consumers with advertising through mass media as before, but must use digital tools to forge relationships with them--no longer seeing people as piggy banks, or eyeballs, or votes, but as genuine stakeholders in their enterprise. Amid the ruins of mass media,the choice for business is stark: listen or perish. Learn more at thechaosscenario.net."
(For those of you following the postWIMP discussion, you might be interested in looking at the post on the chaos scenario.net blog: The Problem with Acronyms. What a coincidence!)
Bob Garfield's insights were foreshadowed by the "Prosumer" video from a couple of years ago:
Google and Yahoo are getting it, and demonstrate foresight by providing free Wi-Fi service in urban environments.
Below is a short video clip of Dana Spiegel, the NYCwireless Executive Director, about Yahoo's sponsorship of free Wi-Fi in Times Square in New York City:
One of my interests is how the power and potential post-WIMP interactive technologies can be harnessed for use for formal and informal education purposes, including life-long collaborative learning.
In May, I had a chance to meet with a number of like-minded people during the CHI 2011 conference at the 2nd Workshop on UI Technologies and Impact on Educational Pedagogy. I was impressed with the depth and breadth of the presentations at the workshop. Since then, I've been looking through other papers and videos from CHI 2011 to find interesting applications that hold potential for use in educational settings.
I've come across a good number of interesting applications and prototypes, so be sure to check back for future posts on this topic. For now, here are a few applications that I'd like to share.
Below are a few videos from Phillip Chi-Wing Fu. (He doesn't know it yet, but I've admitted his videos into the Post-WIMP Explorers' Club.)
Interactive Multi-touch Sketching Interface for Diffusion Curves
"A novel multi-touch sketching interface enabling interactive and practical design with 2D diffusion curves is proposed; featured interaction techniques include simultaneous sketching of multiple diffusion curves and at-the-spot colors tuning."
Distinguishing Multiple Smart-Phone Interactions on a Multi-touch Wall Display using Tilt Correlation
"This paper proposes a novel matching technique, called tilt correlation, which employs the built-in tilt sensor on smart-phones to identify their concurrent contacts on a common multi-touch wall display."
WYSIWYF: Exploring and Annotating Volume Data with a Tangible Handheld Device (CHI 2011)
"Integration of a multi-touch wall display with a tangible handheld device with multi-touch and tilt sensing capabilities to provide intuitive what-you-see-is-what-you-feel visual exploration and annotation of volume data."
Pass-Them-Around: Collaborative Use of Mobile Phones for Photo Sharing (CHI 2011)
"Pass-Them-Around is a phone-based application that allows a small group of collocated people to share photos using the metaphor of passing paper photos around. The prototype encourages people to share their devices and use them interchangeably while discussing photos face-to-face. The prototype supports ad-hoc photo sharing in different contexts by taking into account the spatial arrangement of users around a table, measured with sensors embedded in their mobile phones."
The next video was part of MobileHCI '10: MindMap: Collaborative Use of Mobile Phones for Brainstorming
For just $4.99, this app has given me hours of joy - and I've only had it for a week! The first time I played around with it, I exclaimed that I no longer have a need for my Motif 8 keyboard.
(Seriously, my husband now thinks I'll be unloading my keyboard on eBay or Craigslist soon.)
Below are a couple of videos to give you an idea of what the iPad version of GarageBand is all about:
"Our research shows that the vast majority of people polled in both developed and emerging markets see great potential for NUI applications beyond entertainment. This is especially true in China and India, where 9 out of 10 respondents indicate they are likely to use NUI technology across a range of lifestyle areas – from work, education and healthcare, to social connections, entertainment and the environment. We believe that taking technology to the next billion can be aided by NUI – making technology more accessible and more intuitive to a wider audience". - Steve Clayton, Microsoft
The people at Microsoft don't own the concept! I'm a member of the NUI Group (May, 2007) and SparkOn. Both are on-line communities where you can find people who live and breathe NUI, learn about their work, and even share designs and code. If you are intrigued by NUI - as a designer, developer, or user, please join us.
Note: I've been an evangelist and cheerleader for the NUI cause for many years. If you search this blog for "post-WIMP", "NUI", "multi-touch", "gesture", "off-the-desktop", "natural user interaction", "natural user interface", or even "DOOH", you'll be provided with an overwhelming number of posts that include videos, photographs, and links to NUI-related resources, including scholarly articles. There is a small-but-growing number of people from many disciplines, quietly working on NUI-related projects.
I was fortunate to see some of these interaction techniques and interfaces when I attended CHI 2010 this past April, and plan to share some of my photos and video clips from the conference on this blog soon.
Totally Unrelated
Online connection for foodies
Eatocracy is a new website within the CNN pages that provides news- and more- about all things related to food. The categories on the site include "main", "news", "bite", "sip", "make", "think", and "buzz". The best part, in my opinion, is the heirloom recipe collection index, where people can upload and share family recipies and the stories behind them.
Here is the description of Eatocracy from the website:
Eatocracy "is your online home for smart, passionate conversation and information about food news, politics, culture. We'll highlight regional and family recipes, dive into restaurants and food shopping, chat with celebrity and local chefs, and show you what's for dinner around the world tonight. Grab a place at the table and read with your mouth full."
As I took a peek at Lieven's video links, I noticed an interesting video mash-up Lieven created from the open-source code from the RadioHead's House of Cards music video and his One Million Particles app. I'll post them soon.
I'll try to get video, pictures, and commentary about EVA 2010. EVA stands for Electronic Visualization and the Arts. "Electronic Information, the Visual Arts, and Beyond.
FYI
I'm in the process of sorting through and re-organizing my blogs, which have been around for over four years! During this time, my blogs have attracted a growing number of readers. Because of this, I'd like to make things a bit user-centered. So expect to see little changes here and there. I promise I'll give my readers warnings in advance if I make any serious changes!
If you are new to this blog, you should know that my blogs started out as on-line filing cabinets, open to the world. Although there is a bit of overlap of material and some cross-posting between the blogs, they are arranged to serve as a paper-less way of keeping track of things that I've learned through my coursework, conference attendance, readings, and research. Since emerging technologies are high on my list of interests, I also use my blogs to share interesting things that cross my path.
I changed the name of my World Is My Interface blog to The World Is My Interactive Interface."Off-the-desktop natural user interfaces, interaction, and user experience" are the main topics of the blog. It sometimes includes information about ubiquitous computing and DOOH, otherwise known as Digital Out Of Home.
I plan to tinker with my TechPsych blog later on. It focuses on topics that are useful to psychologists, educators, special education teachers, speech and language therapists, health and wellness professionals, and parents.
Feel free to leave comments, as I welcome your input.
It is about time for an update about touch/gesture- interactive technologies.
I've been researching the latest in "touch" screens and new developments in interactive multi-media content. In just one year, a multitude of websites have been transformed from static to interactive.
Although the initial objective for some of these websites was to optimize the interface and navigation for people accessing websites via touch-screen cell phones, some are ideal for use on touch-enabled slates, the iPad, and even larger touch screen displays and surfaces.
Convergence seems to be the buzz word of the day. Interactive TV. Game sets with Internet access. Movies on your cell phone. Touch screen Coke machines displaying movie trailers. What's happening now, and what is next?
I welcome input from my readers in the form of links to websites, university labs with grad students and professors who are obsessed with emerging interactive technologies, proof-of-concept video clips, video clips of related technologies that are new-to-market, etc.
FYI: I'm also in the middle of writing a series of posts about 3D television technologies for the Innovative Interactivity blog, and welcome input from my readers about this topic.
Soldier Knows Best produces great tech-oriented videos. Here's his spin on all of the rumors about the possibility of the Apple iSlate.
I just inherited a 10 month-old Mac Book, installed Snow Leopard and upgraded to iLife 2009. I'm so used to touching the screen on my HP TouchSmart PC that I found myself touching my Mac Book screen from time to time, especially when I was editing video clips in iMovie. I think the latest version of iMovie was designed with touch/gesture interaction in mind!
From what I can tell, Snow Leopard and iLife 2009 will be able to support a range of touch interactions, if not gesture input as well.
Here are some rumors that have been conjured up and distributed on the web:
I want to see if the iSlate would be good for collaborative educational games, assisted technology, augmentative communication, and alternative assessment for students who have multiple/severe disabilities.
That is a huge goal, so I'm going to start simple. I am not giving up on Windows 7 multi-touch programming. I just have an urge to find out for myself what works, what doesn't, and what platform works best for specific "personas" and "scenarios".
I plan to make a little app for the iPhone/iPod Touch, based on a game I made several years ago, "Shoes Your Battles" for a game class. I think I'd like to make this game for the Apple iTablet!
The first version of Shoes Your Battles created with Game Maker, and the second version was in Flash, back in the days of ActionScript 2.0. I started on third version, one that could be used as an advergame for people to play while shopping for shoes during shoe sales, but it never got past the planning stage.
The idea for the third version came to me when I my elderly aunt came to visit from out-of-town and just hadto go shoe shopping on the day after Thanksgiving. It was extremely difficult to figure out what was on sale, how much it cost, after taking off the previous mark-downs and what was on sale that had a price that was not yet marked down.
Adding to the confusion was the fact that there were few salespeople andherds of women. It was madness. There were pairs of shoes in the wrong boxes, boxes of shoes and no way to quickly find out the true prices! We were in the shoe department for hours, and it wasn't as fun as you'd think. If you've been in a crowded women's shoe department to buy that special pair of shoes during a fantastic shoe sale, you'll know what I mean.
At any rate, I wanted my little "Shoes Your Battles" game to help with this dreadful scenario, by somehow incorporating a shoe shopping advisor and a means to figure out the REAL sales prices of those awesome, to-die-for shoes. Unfortunately, the technology wasn't where it needed to be at the time- I am always dreaming up things that are too d--- futuristic!
4 years later, we have iPhones and SmartPhones and 3G internet and RFID and ubiquitous WiFi and the Wii and more women who like to play games and...and... The time is ripe.
