A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design
I really liked this text, and I strongly agree with the author. The fact that a lot of people envision our future of interaction and technology as just super-powerful phones and laptops isn’t really encouraging. I believe that even now we have so much technologies and innovative interactive things, that saying that in the future, the superior one, it’s just a phone is really not right.
Even now people use a lot of motion, body, voice driven technology. For instance, scrolling using your head, if I recall it correctly, you bow your head up and down to control the screen. Of course, it’s not the most creative, and obviously not the best way to interact but it is still more interesting than just tapping. Voice input is also really crazy that by commanding we can control devices, even if they’re as simple as smart speakers. This just shows that there’re a lot of ways to interact beside simple “tap here, tap there”.
I also find the author’s point on touching and physical response really interesting. This is true that the senses we have in our hands is something we shouldn’t ignore, since it allows for so many ways to interact and so much new technology and art. However, I find it hard to imagine what exactly “useful” or widespread, as smartphones, we can do using these sensations. Maybe it is the reason the author talks about the future and not the present.
This part about hands made me remember some technologies from Professor Eid’s lab once again. As I wrote in the last week’s reading response, they have a device that also triggers vibrations on the fingertips of the user if they touch the object in the VR.
They also had a really cool technology I think can be expanded a lot and that fit the idea of the author perfectly: there was some kind of a handle, and an app where you can choose a texture, for instance, some kind of hard jelly. So, the handle controls a ball that you see on the screen. As you move the handle, the ball moves also. And the thing is, that this handle was also “mimicing” the texture: when you try to push the ball through the jelly, you have some resistance and even that “bouncy” feeling, and when it finally comes through — lightness and 0 resistance. I find it to be SO COOL, and the fact that it’s made using only one handle is mind-blowing. I think if it’s possible to expand this technology to make this object-control dependent on the hands, and passing these sensations to the hands, it will be exactly what the author of the text was describinng.
*This is a short video I filmed of using this device so you can see how it works