The Spatial User Interaction workshop I am attending this weekend features many exciting new approaches to how people can interact with computers. Yet I’ve noticed an odd thing about some of these approaches.
They are cool, they are exciting, they are certainly thought provoking, but in some cases they just don’t work very well. Recognition of a user’s gestures is often error prone, or subject to noise, or ambiguous, or just too coarse for allow fine distinctions.
I’m beginning to think that there is some law of conservation at work here: The more radical is an idea for how people can interact with information, maybe the less likely that it will be truly useful.
I’m not saying that’s always the case, just that I see a pattern.
One example of this, which has become a bit of a joke among people in the user interfaces community, was the way the character played by Tom Cruise in the Stephen Spielberg film Minority Report held his arms up to direct things on the computer screen in front of him. The underlying ideas, which largely came from John Underkoffler, were indeed exciting.
Yet the way those ideas showed up in Spielberg’s direction, they didn’t really work on any practical level. What mere mortal could really hold their arms straight out in front of them for entire minutes at a time?
On the other hand, it looked very cool. 🙂