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>> David Merrill: My name's David Merrill and I'm a principal at Taco Lab based in San Francisco and we build next generation user interfaces.

Background Music My background is in cognitive science and computer science and I've been interested for a long time in how our interactions with computers can be more natural and more efficient and more delightful. My colleague Jeevan Kalanithi and I were at the MIT Media Lab as graduate students, and we started working on a new physical interface called Siftables. Siftables is one example of what I think will be a new ecosystem of what I'm calling hand tools for the digital age, ways to interact with computation that's very different than the mouse and keyboard we use today.

Background Music We have built Siftables so that each tile is a little, self-contained interactive computer with a screen on top, the ability to sense its neighbors and the ability to communicate wirelessly. So you can represent a problem, say a math equation, on the screens of the Siftables with each screen showing one piece of the equation. And then by putting them together, it can compute the results of the equation showing you the answer. The way we use computers now, or even our mobile phones and other mobile devices is usually one person per display, one person per piece of technology. But Siftables is an example of what we've been calling cookie-scale computing where you've got smaller pieces of computation, the size of cookies, and you're actually interacting with a group of them together. And that's a version of computing that we haven't really seen yet, a way of interacting with computers that we think has a lot of potential to increase the ease with which we can manipulate digital information. I think our interfaces for computers in the future are going to take a lot of different forms that are not just gonna be the mouse and keyboard. And so that's really what I'm excited about is to see the ways that we can more seamlessly connect our brain and our intentions to what we can create with the computer, because it's a wonderful tool. It's got a lot of potential, but we're not yet leveraging it in the way that we could. That's the way that I want to interact with computers in the future, is for there to be a seamless translation from a thought that I have in my head to something that I've created with the machine.

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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====

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    1

    daniel.pereznet

    10/09/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Next gen UI: Learning tools and toys for the digital age

    Very Intriguing.

    Computing was born from the business machines and universities back with typewriters with led screens, the PS2 and the little Macintosh and other incarnations, many of which, died in the 80's.

    It seems that computing has not grown much since then. Software and hardware have been refined but within the boundaries of technical and traditional limitations.

    For example, Computing for decades has included a screen, a keyboard and a pointing device. The pointing device and the keyboard on touch-screen computers and mobile computing devices have become one, that is a natural step.

    Still many have not embraced the touch-screen. Perhaps people still need a keyboard because for decades "typing" has been the preferred method of putting thoughts and ideas to down in writing.

    Even I am using a keyboard as I write this response to the video clip on the next generation of computing. Perhaps the touchscreen is not the novel idea we thought it was going to be.

    Even the computer itself, whether MAC or Windows or even Linux PC, still is a very traditional idea. There is the computer itself; whether it be a Windows 7 64 bit Intel Core i7, or the latest MAC Tower, or a the newest Linux 64bit distribution running state-of-art h/w and s/w.

    Even with all the advances, the technology has not really changed that much. You have the computer itself attached to a screen, keyboard and mouse - into which one must load software.

    The re-engineering of what computing means is long over due.

    Daniel Perez
    Perez Networks
    Santa Cruz CA

  •  
    2

    mawilliams1

    10/20/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Next gen UI: Learning tools and toys for the digital age

    This webpage keeps blowing-up our browswers (IE 8.0).

  •  
    3

    kbhagchandani

    11/04/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Next gen UI: Learning tools and toys for the digital age

    Of course this is really a great idea . It must be done .Even i am thinking about it since i am in the field of engineering . i have some ideas to get it in action . I would like to discuss this issue more technically .

  •  
    4

    AdamHart

    11/18/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Next gen UI: Learning tools and toys for the digital age

    cool!..it really is a great idea!...it will make us understand stuff easy...and we'll have better concepts...

  •  
    5

    AdamHart

    11/18/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Next gen UI: Learning tools and toys for the digital age

    cool!..it really is a great idea!...it will make us understand stuff easy...and we'll have better concepts...

    AdamHart
    http://www.isopurewater.com/

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    6

    briana.delaney@...

    12/15/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Next gen UI: Learning tools and toys for the digital age

    No, no. Your browser keeps blowing up because it cannot handle the web page. I'm using Firefox (and Ubuntu Linux) with no problem. This seems like a simple idea that is long overdue, but in a way reminds me of a toy I once saw in a catalog. They were little people inside electronic cubes and the would interact differently depending on how you put them together.

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