It’s the era of the spatial UI

There’s a quiet user experience revolution going on, and although many people are aware of it on an ‘oh that’s neat’ level, I predict that we’ll see a snowball effect of user experiences in 3 dimensions.

The two big players that are bringing spatial UI into the mainstream are the iPhone and Wii.  Although iPhone is primarily a touch-driven device, anyone who has delved into the world of downloadable apps will find some very interesting uses of it’s spatial awareness features: Games that detect tiny changes in tilt angle for driving a car or balancing a pile of blocks, and apps that change to a different mode based on which way up you are holding it. 

You’re most likely already familiar with the Wii-mote and it’s spatial capabilities.  There are actually two features built into the Wii-mote: tilting (like the iPhone) and also pointing at the screen.  As you play through Wii games the controller takes on different modes – at one point you’ll be pointing at what to do next, then you’ll be tilting it to steer a vehicle, then waving it in ‘gestures’.  There’s been a deluge of sub-par games on the Wii since it became such a success, but look carefully and you’ll find games with highly innnovative interactions. 

Spatial UI has been beautifully brought together in the Siftables prototype, whereby small independent computers react to each other depending on each other’s roles and physical relationships.  Watch the presentation at TED and you’ll see it passes the ultimate test: It delights children. So this may not be a consumer device that people will run out and buy tomorrow, but the potential for UI innovation is fascinating.

Spatial experiences are going mainstream with 3D movies.After years sidelined at IMAX and amusement parks the 3D movie is back with a vengeance and it seems like every animated movie is now releasing in 3D. [update:] James Cameron in a recent Time article claims 2D is inherently harder for the brain to process, as opposed to 3 dimensions which the brain is designed to process.

So what’s next?  It’s hard to predict what will be a good spatial experience, how best to use the new technology and we’ll evidently need a period for people to just play with it and see what works and what doesn’t (there’s certainly been a fair share of both so far).  If you have the opportunity to build spatial awareness into your next product, I advise you to embrace it with fervour but also expect to prototype and go through a few iterations before you get it right.

Filed under: 3D, general, revolutions, trends, user interface , 3D, gestures, imax, Innovation, iphone, point, siftables, spatial, tilt, ui, UX, wii

Making sense of 3D Flash interfaces

You must have seen the 3D web and software design trend, starting with Apple’s 3D-esque interface designs of recent years, and lately boosted by the impressive PaperVision 3D for Flash.  They make for beautiful, layered experiences and the sense of depth is intuitively pleasing. However, it doesn’t take much to turn a trend like this into a for-the-sake-of-it gimmick. 

The key to using 3D well is to think about the psychological value of 3D to a user, and not just turning things into 3D willy nilly.  People have portions of their brains that are dedicated to processing 3D visual scenes, and tapping into that is a powerful way to communicate things that have been tricky with 2D design:

Movement patterns provide a major cue in 3D – when objects move in unison (eg, rotating in a circle) there’s evidently a relationship between them.  The path in space taken by the objects give up clues to whether there’s a finite set and how fast you are moving through them. Apple’s ‘coverflow’  carousel is a prominent example of using movement in space but the approach could be applied in many different ways.  

Sense of place is communicated on multiple levels – 2D experience design relies on esoteric navigation constructs such as tabs and breadcrumbs to show people where they are in the overall structure of content.  Although many are now common across hundreds of websites, they take some learning and are often unintuitive.  In contrast, when you’re looking at a 3D scene with objects located in relative space the structure is immediately evident and familiar.  

Proximity = relevance – when you have many spatial constructs, the ones in close proximity are the ones that you assume are relevant to the matter at hand.  In a 2D space, this type of approach becomes a difficult task of managing clutter. Using size, location and perspective in 3D space is powerful for showing relevance, not just because of the extra dimensions but also because our brains are designed to process things that way.

Real world rules apply – unlike unique constructs built for UIs, the rules of 3D are the rules of the real world, so it’s easy to know whether you are breaking the rules based on what would make sense in the world: Objects shouldn’t appear out of nowhere, things should move predictably and with a sense of weight/mass, and so on.

Bonus: Lessons from 3D games have been learnt over years of experimentation and evolution that can now be leveraged in UI design. Video games have been building complex 3D interactive experiences for years and UI designers can actually claim some reference value from those hours of playing!

Filed under: 3D, creative delivery, information architecture, revolutions, style, trends, user interface, user-centred , 3D, design, flash, papervision3d, psychology

I love-hate MSNBC’s new visual newsreader

I’ve just played with MSNBC’s new ‘visual newsreader’, which they have named Spectra.  

I love…

• simplicity and elegance of the design – it’s one visual concept, uncluttered by controls and embellishments – which I’m a big fan of
• gorgeous use of colour reminiscent of Adobe’s new product branding – adding the slight gradient to each colour block makes it vibrant and delectable
• the third dimension – perhaps inspired by Apple’s forays into 3D like Coverflow (although why couldn’t they have put more 3D in the Apple TV interface?) – adds a delightful sense of depth in a natural, instinctive way

I hate…

• The inappropriateness of this as a news reading device!  I scan through probably 50 to 100 news stories on my feeds each day, which I could never do with this
• I chose ‘order by time’ but I can’t tell how the order is represented
• Clicking on an item before it flies by can be pretty challenging
• When I pick an item it flips over as it comes to the foreground – so shouldn’t it now be upside down or back to front?  
• Even though it’s 3D I can’t zoom in or rearrange it – which I would like to as half the stories are off the top of the page

The mere fact that they’ve built this is very exciting, and I see on Organic’s blog that it was made with Papervision, which is a very neat extension of Flash that I’ve been watching for a while.  This is definitely one of the most interesting projects built on PaperVision but it saddens me that they were so carried away with the high concept that they couldn’t keep it practical too. 

P.S. For this topic I’ve created a new category – Folly – in the architectural sense 

 

Filed under: creative delivery, folly, style , 3D, adobe, apple, apple tv, coverflow, folly, msnbc, newsreader, papervision, rss, spectra, usability

The death of windows

I believe we are seeing the creeping and not-distant demise of windows.  I’m not talking about Microsoft Windows specifically (although I’d be fairly happy to see the creeping death of that particular product) but in general I’m referring to the windows GUI.  Anyone with a little knowledge of UI design history will be aware that the window metaphor was developed at Xerox PARC and was brought to the mainstream in Apple’s early products.  It was revolutionary back then but today there are better, more user-friendly ideas arising at the forefront of software design.

I’m seeing more and more software using full-screen configurable spaces instead of small, layered windows, and this is where we can expect the future to lie.  Examples are the tabbed interfaces like Firefox and the new Thunderbird. There are also iTunes and the iLife consumer suite produced by Apple, where each program takes on the full screen and lays out it’s features in a simple, configurable format.

The most innovative interface designs I have seen – period – come from 3D software.  I’ve been working on some 3D modelling the last couple of years and I’ve been blown away by the sophistication and configurability of the software UIs.  For example, Bodypaint - the UI is an incredibly configurable and malleable workspace that takes up the screen but let’s you lay it out how you wish.  This isn’t the scatter of floating palettes and views that is the norm with 2D image editing software. Instead, the palettes and views may be added, moved, grouped and collapsed at the user’s will, and the screen layout shifts to accommodate.  

I also believe that the full-screen UIs of mobile devices and interactive TV will have a major influence on software design in the next few years.  Digital designers take inspiration from the devices they personally use and the more they are exposed to the latest mobile and TV interfaces, the more we’ll see it rub off on other UI designs, especially considering the new ideas that are coming out in those areas as they go through rapid innovation.

 

 

Filed under: 3D, general, revolutions, style, trends, user interface, user-centred , 3D, apple, bodypaint, design, firefox, GUI, ilife, interactive TV, thunderbird, windows