Like most design professionals I’m signed up for way too many email newsletters and discussion lists. Thank goodness for the digest feature. Somewhere that feature’s inventor is sitting at the same table as the “Copy and Paste” guy, talking about the old days in which their features didn’t exist and how hard a time they had it, blah, blah, etc. Ya know, the kind of conversation your parents gave you as a kid – “In my day, we had to walk five miles to school, uphill, in the snow”. Anyway, many of the email newsletters and discussion lists contain a lot of fluff and philosophical discussions about how to use the back button or whatever, but sometimes I come across things that I think could radically change the way we go about our work as designers and the way people involve technology in their lives – a couple of which I’ll share with you here.
There’s some hidden, to the general masses at least, ideas and products happening being developed at Microsoft. I say hidden, simply because to the general public Microsoft typically comes out looking like a big bully at times, but if they knew about some of the other things that they’ve been working on, they might see them in a different light. For example, a technology that has been in the works for a while and is just nearing a release is Microsoft’s Surface technology. Another product, in its beta stage, is Microsoft’s Photosynth.
Microsoft Surface Technology
Microsoft Surface technology started as a vision created by a couple guys in their research group. From acceptance of the vision at a leadership level, the design iterated to where it is today – an interactive, table-like, product that understands context of its environment along with human touch and gestures. Yes, no mouse, keyboard, application file menu, etc., getting in the way of an individual’s ability to interact with the product. Awesome. Take, for example, a scenario in which you are out at dinner with two friends at a restaurant and what to split the bill three ways – simply touch the screen, place your card on the table and touch and slide your meal and drinks towards your credit card and you’re done. Now, as a designer, start to imagine how this might impact your design process for a product, the way you create the user interface, the interactions, patterns, etc. – quite possibly a whole new way to approach design solutions. There’s a lot here that could possibly even create new specialization within the design and development fields – e.g. gesture specialists, advanced recognition technology experts, etc.
Microsoft Photosynth
Since technology advances have made digital cameras very affordable over the last several years, it has created millions more hobbyist photographers. These hobbyist photographers are producing so many digital photos, they’re sure to need a tool to organize, view and enjoy their collections. Welcome, Photosynth, a software product that creates relationships among digital images, primarily photos, and reconstructs them into a three-dimensional space to show how each relates to the other. The best example that came to mind when I saw a video presentation of this was that of a 360 degree panoramic or a virtual tour of a room of a house. It looks to be truly a social network tool for digial photos. Unlike a tool such as Flickr, where you manually create metadata and group photos together based upon various attributes, this tool uses the metadata you provide, then analyzes the photos’ visual similarities to create the relationships. By doing so, it allows you to do things such as view photos from various angles, zoom-in, etc., using photos that you have taken and basically filling in the missing pieces with others’ photos. I’m imagining that we’re not too far off from a day where anyone can visit a destination virtually and walk away with some of the same breathtaking experiences as-if you visited in person. The way you interact with your digial photo collection will surely be changed.
Wow, Cool, Neato Don’t Really Do Justice Here
Truly these technologies are on the cutting-edge. They are examples of how we may think differently about not only a design approach, but how we interact with technology ourselves and other people through technology. It’s exciting to see examples such as these because they provide an example of the integration of technology into our daily lives without it being an impairment, but rather just something that happens, something we don’t even think about using or doing.
