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| Roundup of Visual Computing Innovations |
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posted by Editor
on Monday September 29, @06:55PM
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Developers continue to refine approaches for visual computing as consumers become more attuned to the possibilities for 3D web experiences, tactile interfaces, and advanced visualization of data and social computing structures. Here are some recent technologies to emerge in these areas:
- David Greenfield asks whether browsers will become the preferred entrypoint for the 3D web, as shown by the recent flood of offerings for plugging 3D web site visualization into standard browsers, such as GoWeb3D, WebFlock from Electric Sheep Company (which appears to have broadened its ambitions beyond adding value to Second Life), Google's Lively, Altadyn's 3DXplorer, and ExitReality.
- Microsoft has been showing off a spherical version of its Surface multi-touch display.
- The Kitchen Budapest Medialab has developed a Zooming User Interface based on Flash called ZuiPrezi - try it out in this sandbox and tutorial and see this example presentation.
- Eagle Mode is an open source ZUI platform that lets users visit almost anything simply by zooming in. It has a professional file manager, file viewers for common file types, a chess game, a 3D mines game, a multi-function clock and some fractal fun, all integrated into a virtual "cosmos" space (see screenshots).
- This NY Times article (free registration required) highlights the growing use of IBM's Many Eyes web site that lets visitors submit data and visualize it using various methods. While the site was originally intended for processing numerical data, it is increasingly being used to analyze the contents of large text files (see visualizations of presidential campaign speeches from John McCain and Barack Obama).
- Skyrails is a tool that was originally developed for visualizing social network visualisation, but can be used to interact with any reasonably sized graph (see screenshots).
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| Mobile Phones Now Exceed PCs By 3-to-1 |
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posted by Editor
on Friday July 18, @12:10AM
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This article Gizmag reports on new market research showing that there are now more than three times as many mobile phones in the world as there are PCs. According to the research, the number of PCs installed worldwide just surpassed 1 billion units, and they are still growing at a rate of 12% annually, but there will soon be 4 billion active mobile phones (with more than one in two humans globally carrying cell phones). Indeed, web access via mobile phones is now outpacing wireless access from a PC in many of areas of the world. As mobile devices become capable of running increasingly sophisticated applications, their massive installed base will become ever more attractive to software development businesses, which are fundamentally driven by volume -- assuming, of course, that developers can come up with apps that users actually find worthwhile enough to pay for. The new wave of applications for the iPhone is potentially a critical leading indicator for the kinds of applications that will be most in demand on powerful connected handhelds.
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| Viewzi Presents Search Results through Multiple Custom Views |
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posted by Editor
on Monday July 07, @11:53PM
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Viewzi is a new metasearch engine that allows users to experience search results through multiple visual perspectives. Unlike traditional search engines, which usually present users with a single perspective, Viewzi is designed to provide a nearly unlimited number of tailored views of search results, which can be selected in a visual, iPhone-like interface. In addition to simple text views, some of the current views available include 3D photo cloud, video thumbnails, recipes, and music albums. The system is extensible, allowing third parties to develop new classes of views. What is the business model? Viewzi will offer sponsored views, built entirely by advertising partners that mix relevant search results with commercial blurbs (and of course, they will also offer the traditional sponsorship model in which advertisers position their message alongside search results for preferred keywords).
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| Google's Command Line Interface; P2P Virtual Worlds; and the Survival of MS Surface |
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posted by Editor
on Monday June 02, @11:17PM
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Here are a few recent links related to next-generation interfaces:
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posted by Editor
on Saturday March 29, @09:31PM
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posted by Editor
on Friday March 14, @12:21AM
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This New York Times article explores the possibility that users are ready to embrace interfaces that let them directly control objects in a 3D space on their screen, blending 3D representations of content with physics software to produce visually stimulating experiences. A number of consumer offerings are now appearing that are designed to exploit immersive 3D environments to make viewing large numbers of web pages, videos, and pictures more efficient. The article features PicLens, a FireFox plugin that transforms the browser into a full-screen, 3D experience for viewing images on the web. With PicLens, arrays of photos are brought to life via a cinematic presentation that extends beyond the confines of the traditional browser window, using an interactive "3D Wall" allowing users to drag, click, and zoom their way around a wall of pictures (see screenshot).
A company not mentioned in the article is SpaceTime, which has just officially launched its SpaceTime 1.0 3D web browser. SpaceTime turns internet searches, YouTube videos, eBay listings and other web content into 3D elements that move around the screen (see YouTube demo). Another company called 3B offers a browser that allows users to take any collection of web sites or photos, and place them into a personalized 3D space called a 3B room (see screenshots). The question remains whether these tools truly make browsing more efficient, or are just eye-candy that will produce only a short-lived fit of interest before users return to their more familiar 2D point-and-click habits.
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| IBM's 3D Data Center Lets Users Remotely Manage Real Systems In Virtual World |
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posted by Editor
on Wednesday February 27, @01:12AM
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IBM announced technology that recreates 3D representations of IT data centers in a secure virtual world. The experience is designed to help administrators better monitor and manage the entire IT platform by allowing them to navigate an immersive 3D environment containing familiar structures such as servers, power equipment, and displays. The 3D data center collects real-time data from different facilities in the real world, and uses physical metaphors to visualize hot spots, data flow, and server utilization (so an overloaded server appears to be spitting flames etc). Since the 3D datacenter is truly a multi-user virtual world, administrators can collaborate on solving problems through a shared experience. The environment can also be used as a modeling and simulation tool. The system was implemented using OpenSIM, an open source Virtual Worlds Server that can be used to create a Second Life-like environment running in a standalone mode, or connected to other OpenSim instances through built-in grid technology. This YouTube video shows a demo of the 3D Data Center in action, and this brochure (PDF) explains the concepts behind its design.
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| Zoom Quilt 3D Zooming Interface Updated |
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| Recent Developments in Visualization, Virtual Worlds, and Interfaces |
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posted by Editor
on Thursday January 31, @12:20AM
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Here are a few articles discussing recent developments with next-generation user experiences:
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Interview with UI expert Ben Shneiderman about the growing impact of data visualization on the web. Mentions Smart Money's MarketMap stock market visualizer and IBM's ManyEyes, which allows users to upload their own data for advanced visualization.
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Metaplace allows virtual worlds to be inserted directly into standard web sites using a scripting language called MetaScript, which is based on Lua
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Article in MIT Technology Review entitled "The fleecing of the Avatars" talks about some major incidences of financial fraud that have recently occurred in virtual worlds, which is causing users to set up quasi-regulatory structures.
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This blog posting by visualization expert Edward Tufte has a video that reviews how successfully Apple's iPhone exploits its limited screen real estate
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Cynergy Systems has developed a Minority Report-like interface called Project Maestro using Microsoft's Silverlight rich web application toolkit (see video demo)
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| Roundup of Advanced Interface Systems |
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posted by Editor
on Monday December 03, @10:46PM
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This article in Smashing Magazine highlights a few advanced interface systems that have shown up in the last year. The Cheoptics360 from Vizoo is an impressive 3D holographic display (see this YouTube video of a demo system at the Copenhagen airport turning the heads of passing travellers). Reactable is a collaborative electronic music instrument with a tabletop multi-touch interface, on which several performers play at the same time by moving and rotating physical objects on a luminous round table surface (see picture). Microsoft's Photosynth project takes a large collection of photos of one place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing how each image relates to the next. The interface is based on the Seadragon technology that Microsoft acquired last year, which provides a very high-performance zooming interface over image data of any resolution (see video of TED demo). The article also mentions the BumpTop 3D desktop and Jeff Han's Multi-Touch Interaction Research.
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Is the end near for the file/folder metaphor?
The superficial "look-and-feel" of an interface is distinct from the more fundamental issue of how it represents data to the user. In this regard, potentially dramatic improvements are possible.
Read More
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