Microsoft Surface

One of the cool things about Tokyo University’s holographic interface idea is that it is genuinely tactile:

A quick montage of hologram VFX from Iron Man 2

It’s pretty remarkable to see tools like the Wacom in skilled hands:

If you can figure out what a Töken multitouch screen is, you can run Emulator and do this:

Here’s a quick tutorial for Seline HD, mentioned above

This “iPad Orchestra” video is kind of cool, but only hints at the real potential of Seline HD

This “iPad Band” video is a cleanly edited – if not immaculately performed – runthrough of various tools.

Why does Green Day hate the iPad? Maybe they’re just getting old and stodgy. Or maybe they really ARE punk at heart.

This demo of iHolophone is cool, if only because it’s running on a phone.

I’m always babbling about innovative laptops and cool user interfaces, but the video at left explaining a new user interface concept by 10GUI is probably the most insightful rethinking of the desktop that I’ve seen in a long time. As an interface designer myself, I think the iPhone (although I feel no need to own one myself) is probably the most brilliant personal computer interface to date. I’ve been dying to own a larger device that utilizes its multitouch features, which is why I’m always drooling over the idea of a Mac tablet or dual-touchscreen laptop, but have also often thought about how a lot of the features of a multitouch screen are actually antithetical to the realities of desktop use. This video by 10GUI references that, and offers a fantastic solution. I’d have to try the deeper levels of task and file management that they demonstrate in the video before I’d know if I agree with the solutions offered, but on the surface they make perfect sense. I’d love to see this interface integrated into a real device and try it. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, the nerd all the nerds love to hate (Michael Arrington) just (ahem) touched on  this topic the other day over at TechCrunch.

10GUI shows us where it hurts:

Other than watching Tom Cruise get abused by the Dr. Solomon Eddie character (played by persvasive creepy bad guy Peter Stormare), one of the coolest things about the film Minority Report was probably the gestural computer interface that Cruise’s character used in his police work. While many developers have been working on ideas like this for awhile, they often are not quite there – like this cool video demo, which is really just a huge iPhone-like multi-touch display – or they seem a bit misguided in their goals. Like Mgestyk Technologies, where they take a great idea and demostrate it with first-person shooter games. The clip seen here is the latest from Oblong, who seems to have the most sophisticated and practical system in operation. Not surprising, since they were consultants on the Minority Report effects, which were based on existing MIT work.

Years ago I had a dream in which I was playing an amazing instrument that responded to my hand gestures and thoughts, creating sublime, transcendent music that moved the soul. Then I woke up. The best that I had at my disposal at the time was still my electric guitar, because a velocity sensitive keyboard, although it’s pretty cool, had been around for awhile. The evolution of the musical instrument interface has amazing possibilities these days, as evident in the reactable project created by students at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. As is so often the case though, the same technology seems to be more immediately applicable to practical needs, like selling cocktails. The clip at left is the brick, a “Tangible & Multi Touch Sonification Instrument”. Which is one of the more creative and purposeful interfaces I’ve seen. Many of these concepts are clever, but end up being rather non-musical or like the reacTogon, just a a clever redesign of existing ideas. Coming at things from the other direction, Japanese artist Daito Manabe lets the music play him (YouTube clip). If you watch that video, you’ll get a feel for what it means to “surrender to your art”. That can’t feel good. Daito Manabe’s YouTube page is here; he also seems to do interesting public performance art projects like whitebase + Daito Manabe and disturbing video experiments like Milk. Yucky.