The guys at MIT always come up with cool stuff. I’m wondering what it would take to do this in Flash. Probably the hardest thing would be recognizing the shapes. The actual physics part is rather straight forward.
You’ve probably already seen Johnny Lee ( Mr. 3D ) on youTube here, here, here, here, … you get the point.
Now you can see him presenting at TED.com.
Check out this site: xrez.com. They have lots of pixels.
xres.com uses the GoogleMaps API to display a huge array of photos that you can use to zoom and pan in an environment. And when that environment is Yosemity then you have something worth exploring. I can’t wait to see more.
The TED.com website has undergone quite a few changes recently with a new design and features. This morning I saw a video on their site that uses a very simple and usable form of video navigation that I think everyone should see. (In addition the video content itself is worthy of viewing.)
The video interface looks simple enough, as you see here. It pretty much your standard layout. What they did that is unique is when you mouse over the video timeline it expands - as you can see to the right here. In the expansion you get additional information about the video in how the content is arranged. So you can drag your playhead to view a specific portion. But even better, you con simply click on a label in the expansion and jump to that section of the video. So not only do you get more information about how the video content is organized and it’s length but you can navigate straight to it.
It’s pretty clear that to make this work you need to have Adobe Communication Server, or whatever they’re calling it today, because the video needs to be streamed instead of progressive. But this is TED where pretty much everything they do is top shelf.
You could do this with a progressive download but the user wouldn’t be able to jump to portions of the video that haven’t been downloaded yet.
This is the sort of User eXperience (UX) that when you see it you think, “Well, I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.” I’ll see what I can do to add a UX like this to my video.Maru code.
Microsoft is making news today by showing off it’s Surface project to the public. And while MS-Surface is very impressive it’s also old news in many ways. Many teams are doing research into multi-touch user interfaces.
Jeff Han, of New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, gave an excellent demonstration at TED, back in August 2006, where he showed his teams research into this exciting field.
And if you liked that you’re gonna love these - more of the same from Jeff Han.
Similar but not multi-touch is this work from MIT - these guys are real smart.
And this amazing work from BumpTop.com.
It’s clear that the evolution of user interfaces has a long way to go from the keyboard and mouse. Webcams are becoming ubiquitous and their input is just beginning. Add to that RFID, voice, video recognition, and many others that have not even made it to the back of a napkin yet and it’s clear to see that the future of UX is going to be exciting.
If you’re looking for data on baby names, or just looking to waste some time with a cool website, then try out BabyNameWizard.com.
This work by the Dynamic Graphics Project at the U of Toronto is some of the most amazing stuff I’ve seen for creating an interactive desktop.
Allison Randal’s blog - O’Reilly Radar - about how email doesn’t work, got me to thinking about how Adobe Apollo might influence the application market. Sure, there’s the cross platform capabilities and the ability to work with data both on and off line. But I think one of the aspects that might be getting overlooked is how it will help build an ecosystem of application development.
Currently to develop applications you need a host of programmers, system analysts, etc. It’s a lot to bit off and a big commitment. But with Apollo you can pretty much leverage you’re current employee assets. Any serious design firm has a few Actionscript coders around. You’re pretty much set. Well, these people are going to have to get up to speed on Actionscript 3 and the Apollo environment, when it comes out, but that’s what developers do. Just give them some time and space.
The upshot of all this is we are likely to see a bevy of new applications in the next few years developed with Apollo. Needless to say email applications will be one of the more popular Apollo apps. Maybe a few of them will come up with some improvements on the current crop standard email apps and we’ll see an evolution of those into a few apps that really hit a home run with features and usability.
