Over decades we've used to adapt our habits, behavior and mindset to technology. We've improved our productivity by using tools and devices designed especially for the tasks we have to deal with regularly. But we've also constrained our abilities to the features of the very tools and devices we've become dependant on.

We've got used to a number of things. To traditional mouse-keyboard user interaction, to 2D windows-based user interface and to a rather unspectacular user's workflow which enables one user interact with only one application at a time. For instance, while you're browsing in your web browser you can't scale your text and resize your window simultaneously — unless you are a keyboard-shortcut-master.

Good news: it can be different. Below we present some of the outstanding recent developments in the field of user experience design. Most techniques may seem very futuristic, but they are reality. And in fact, they are extremely impressive. Keep in mind: they can become ubiquitous over the next years.

Future For Gamers: Cheoptics360™

Absolutely incredible. Cheoptics360 is a Vizoo's product which can change our understanding of 3D for always. This is a documentation of the 5x5 meter Cheoptics360 in the Vizoo's showroom. No special effects or compositing has been used editing this movie. This is the real thing. Official web-site.

reactable

reactable is a collaborative electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible multi-touch interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving and rotating physical objects on a luminous round table surface.

By moving and relating these objects, representing components of a classic modular synthesizer, users can create complex and dynamic sonic topologies, with generators, filters and modulators, in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language. Demos.

Multi-Touch

Multi-Touch Technology
Multi-Touch-based devices accept input from multiple fingers and multiple users simultaneously, allowing for complex gestures, including grabbing, stretching, swiveling and sliding virtual objects across the table. While touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact, multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations. Demos 1, Demos 2.

Such sensing devices are inherently also able to accommodate multiple users simultaneously, which is especially useful for interactive walls and tabletops. Multi-Touch is already widely used. Apple's iPhone has Multi-Touch scrolling and picture manipulation.

Microsoft Surface

Multi-Touch is also the core of Microsoft Surface, an interactive tabletop which allows a user, or multiple users, to manipulate digital content by the use of natural motions, hand gestures, or physical objects by putting them on the surface.

BumpTop

Bumptop is a fresh user interface that takes the usual desktop metaphor to a glorious, 3D extreme. In this physics-driven universe, important files finally get the weight they deserve via an oddly satisfying resizing feature, and the drudgery of file organization becomes a freewheeling playground full of crumpled documents and clipping-covered "walls." TED-presentation of Bumptop.

Further References

• 3D Operating System
  Next Generation Operating System from Sun Micro Systems
• XTR3D is real-time software that analyzes 3D human motions using only one simple web cam, without any additional accessories. It will allow users to play games and interact in virtual worlds using natural human motions instead of keyboards, mouses and joysticks. Released Sep 27, 2007.