Pivot garnered quite a bit of attention at the 2010 MIX conference, and attendees were apparently wowed by the elegant and engaging interaction model.
I can see numerous applications for this technology in my field of healthcare technology. Pivot could be used to track symptoms across thousands of patients, identifying trends, common side-effects, and adverse events. The application could also have use for processing and analyzing electronic medical records.
Check out the demo video here:
The Microsoft Pivot platform is a free download from Microsoft Labs. Worth a look!
You may also want to check out Mike Demopoulos’ write up on healthcare applications of technologies promoted at the 2010 MIX Conference at Cambridge BioMarketing’s Biorhythms blog. Mike also hosts two great blogs on Silverlight and WPF development.
]]>Read about the development approach and how the interactions, photography, and text were all composited.
VIV Mag Interactive Feature Spread – iPad Demo from Alexx Henry on Vimeo.
]]>Great dataviz from GE and Ben Fry: http://www.ge.com/visualization/health_costs/index.html
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Posted via web from bzipkin’s posterous
Check out this demo of new HCI paradigm that could have legs. Scrub forward to about 4mins to see the demo in practice.
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From Graphpaper.com — don’t you miss the tactile feel of old phones?
]]>A couple of examples:
VitraView by InterKnowlogy
This application allows doctors and patients to review surgical procedures, document procedures, and personalized medical information pulled from Microsoft Healthvault. Developed by Interknowlogy.
Patient Consultations on MS Surface
Developed by Infusion, this tool provides a platform that facilitates patient and healthcare provider communications during medical consultations. The app was named as one of the 11 Killer Apps for Microsoft Surface by Fast Company.
While much of the technology is Microsoft-centric (someday everyone will have a Surface table), the concepts are insightful and cool. Enjoy.
Also check out their Healthcare Vision demo.
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Gestural recognition allows users to interact with a system without providing a direct input like a tap or click. The system recognizes hand movements and other signals and responds accordingly. Combinations of gestures (or a gestural system not unlike sign language) could be used to interact at much higher speeds than current interface techniques. It’s not a stretch to imagine gestural UI systems that adapt and personalize to a user’s specific gestural mannerisms. When combined with voice recognition, gestural UI will create new paradigms for computer/human interactions that could revolutionize how we interface with machines.
And we’re not that far away…
Gestural UIs are already out there in rudimentary form and are evolving at frighteningly fast rate:
- One of the best examples of gestural UI is the Nintendo Wii. The Wii’s success is based on its revolutionary new gaming interface—gestural game interactions.
- Healthcare is another industry that is beginning to experiment with gestural interfaces. A group of Israeli researchers has developed an application that allows doctors to manipulate medical images using gestures. This replaces the need to use a mouse or touch-screen device—eliminating possible contaminants that accumulate on physical hardware.
- Another cool application is in the kitchen. Bang & Olufsen is developing a hands-free remote control prototype. This control could have a number of interesting applications, although Bang & Olufsen is targeting it at kitchen devices (you won’t need to wash your hands before using the remote).
- In addition to Apple, several mobile phone and PDA manufacturers have recently filed patents for gestural control applications. The iPhone’s touch UI is likely a glimpse of what future handsets will support.
I expect we’ll see more and more applications and prototypes emerge in the next few years.
When Minority Report came out in 2002 the technologies it envisioned seemed far off. Gestural UIs were only one example—the film showed paper-thin LCDs, personalized ad displays, and 3-D imaging. With advances in materials and processors we may see these technologies a lot sooner than we think.
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Don’t me get wrong, Chrome is pretty cool and they’ve integrated a handful of user experience elements that are surprising in their logic and brilliance. Here are four that struck me.
1. Dragging a tab to the desktop creates a new browser window
One of the new innovations in Chrome is that each tab is treated as its own browser. A nice byproduct of this functionality is the ability to create new browser windows by simply dragging a browser tab Chrome to the desktop. Browser tabs were a great innovation a few years ago, but can be somewhat limiting—viewing two pages side-by-side requires the spawning of a new browser window. Chrome makes a thorny process a lot easier.
2. Maximum Screen Optimization
Chrome barely seems like an application. Extreme care and attention was taken to minimize the profile of browser controls and navigation, opting to dedicate as much screen space to the main window. The top navigation and menu controls have approximately 33% less profile than IE or Firefox (and this at the default settings…no toolbars added). Anyone who works in UX understands how difficult it is to maximize controls without sacrificing usability. Chrome does a great job at this.
3. The Omnibox
The multi-purpose search and URL box might take some getting used to, but overall is a nice tactic for minimizing and optimizing input fields. Although Firefox’s awesome bar has a better experience and is more legible, they still support a separate URL and search input box. I like where Chrome is going with this.
4. Kill Screen
Chrome displays a “kill screen” when it detects an unresponsive page. While this may not be that useful with web pages in general, this could be an incredibly useful feature with application development.
Finally, Chrome is built for speed. While new features and functions are always welcome with web browsers, if they come at the sacrifice of speed they are problematic. At first look, the UX of Chrome seems to be a step back from Firefox and Explorer, but after some experimentation and use it becomes clear that Google is looking beyond features and envisioning browsing as a user’s core computing experience. This minimalist approach may make users uncomfortable at first, but it should not take long for Chrome to gain significant share of the browser market.
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