I have been working on this for quite a while. I finally chiseled out the final details of it yesterday and posted it this morning. I submit to abandon the WIMP acronym and move towards a more OCGM interface.
Objects
Containers
Gestures
Manipulations
Yes, and its a very cool coincidence that it could be rearranged to sound like Occam’s Razor.
I have been thinking about this stuff pretty deeply for a while. Josh Blake mentioned your post and the OCGM concept, and I like it. I’ll add more to this thread after I read your post, finish Josh’s post, and think some more thoughts...oh, and make dinner.
I posted in the blog comments, but thought I’d also put my fun alternative to OCGM that spawned from my concern that trying to create a WIMP for NUI is like trying to create a WIMP for the whole natural world, since NUI is striving to make interacting with computers as natural and seamless as possible. It seems like WIMP was more about expressing the inherent limitations of what they had to work with at the time.
So my version is ExistSenseIntendActResult = EASIAR pronounced like ‘easier’.
Thinking about your ExistSenseIntendActResult = EASIAR acronym, I was just reading a review of the interaction in the Nintendo Wii game, “Silent Hill, Shattered memories” on the Collaborate or Die blog (the blog is written by someone at Interface Guru). The point of the review is that the game makes it interaction easier for the gamer. Here is an excerpt from the reveiw:
“The main use for the Wii Remote is as the game’s flashlight (if the player waves the Wii Remote around, the main character will mimic the action in the game)…but that is not all. The Wii Remote also functions as a cell phone (the player will have to hold the speaker in the Wii Remote to their ear in real life to hear phone calls in the game – just like they would a real cell phone)”
I’m serious about looking at game interaction to inform what I do. Game designers/developers have to think about off-the-desktop interaction all of the time, otherwise the whole industry would go out of business. For example, when I first got my Wii, I had a head cold. I was immobilized on the couch, and I wanted to read the newspaper. I couldn’t entertain myself by playing a game on the Wii, because moving about with my throbbing head was out of the question.
I didn’t feel like getting up and going down stairs to fetch the newspaper. My laptop was in my car, in the cold garage, and my desktop was across the house. So I played around with the Wii controller, and realized that I could spin around the “Earth” and locate the news from any major city, and then read it in large print on my TV screen.
Easier, right?!
This is why we need to think about HCI concepts such as “personas” and “scenarios” when we create new systems/methods of interaction.
p.s. I took a couple of game development classes, so that is why I look at game interaction more seriously than you’d think, given the fact that I’m a middle-aged woman.
@Lynn,
You definitely don’t have to sell me on games as great sources for innovation in HCI. I sometimes envy the freedom game designers have to try off-the-wall ideas, and I always try to appreciate what they’re trying to do. Wii and Natal are paving the way for universal NUI design in the guise of gaming appliances. And some of my favorite games are memorable in large part because of their extremely well designed interfaces. Working on NUI applications for platforms like Surface has given me a taste of that freedom in non-gaming contexts. But we’re just starting to explore the possibilities.
It’s exciting to watch the community as a whole strive for setting some foundational standards (though I have to give props to how far the Surface team got in terms of establishing best practices and tools before they released anything).
It’s exciting to watch the community as a whole strive for setting some foundational standards (though I have to give props to how far the Surface team got in terms of establishing best practices and tools before they released anything).
I’m really pumped about this—the beauty and symmetry of OCGM (plus the Occam’s Razor connection) is great.
I think the value of OCGM is equal parts marketing and concepts. The marketing part is important, since it is hard to explain NUI to non-technical people. Lynn was telling me she has been searching for a way to explain NUI to educators and others. The concepts are of course critical to help designers and developers understand common ideas.
OCGM isn’t quite on the same place on the abstract-concrete continuum as WIMP. There is more room for flexibility in OCGM to include different types of interface inputs. Ron does a good job of explaining this in his latest post.
Yes, this is a good discussion. I need to go back and read the more recent comments on Ron George’s blog.
I’m glad I have time to look things over more in-depth. I’m off work until January 11th! (I’ll be on a cruise- with internet access that costs $$$$$. Unfortunately, not on one of those Holland America cruise ships that have a few Microsoft Surfaces in one of the lounges. If so, I’d be doing a lot of people-watching in the lounge, for informal research purposes.)
Thanks, Josh, for posting those links. I updated my post to include a link to Ron’s “Part 2”.
I think I will wait to write my Part 2, since I have several things I’m reading, looking at, thinking about, and so forth.
I noticed that Ben has a link to a YouTube video about the work of Accenture and Avanade Touch Technology, which has some examples that might help “regular” people understand the basic “what and how” of touch screen technology. It provides examples of the Surface as well as an HP TouchSmart. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UvGWGZ1pGo&feature=youtube_gdata
I’d like create a couple of my own videos to my “Part 2” post. I have an HP TouchSmart PC and have been putting off producing videos about some of my applications. I also plan to do a video that features websites that work well on a touchscreen or IWB.
Always nice to see FriendFeed get some love. Maybe we need a wave too.
@Lynn, thanks for the link to one of our videos. The team I work on did a couple Surface demos in the past couple years too. They’re starting to feel a bit dated now, and I won’t say they are necessarily shining examples of perfect NUI design, but we learned a lot while making them. It was interesting to be talking to the Surface team while they were obviously still having some fundamental internal design debates. In fact, I don’t remember that the term NUI was even being used when I first starting working on Surface.
I was thinking, it might be interesting to take an existing NUI application (maybe one of the more successful Surface apps) and break it down in OCGM terms.
I was thinking, it might be interesting to take an existing NUI application (maybe one of the more successful Surface apps) and break it down in OCGM terms
*Ears perk up*
That sounds like a request for a NUI Deconstruction!
If only someone had a web journal or online log specializing in Deconstructing NUIs…
Oh right.
Any suggestions for which application or video to do?
If only someone had a web journal or online log specializing in Deconstructing NUIs…
Oh right.
Any suggestions for which application or video to do?
lol
Well, it might make sense to do a few that range from simple to complex. The Surface photos application, for example, is extremely simple. It’s very literal about objects (pictures) and containers (library control) and manipulations. However, I can’t think of any gestures in that app. It may be interesting to note that a NUI application might not need to have every piece of OCGM. Look at the water attraction app. It arguably doesn’t even have any containers (unless you think of the water as an object and the table as a container).
If you want to shoot for complex, I’d suggest pieces of the Office Labs future vision videos. Lots of good stuff there. The Natal demos, or any Wii game, would also work well.
The new WIMP is fine with me. I could have a NING group for this, called “The Post-WIMP Explorers Club”. I came up with the name as a joke, but I think it fits!
I just made a YouTube playlist of 100+ videos under this name.
