Gurgitations

As a follow up to the last post, I wanted to share another cool mobile interface I came across. Some researchers at a Microsoft and Mitsubishi electric research labs have created a mobile interface they’re calling “lucid touch”.

The prototype uses the back of the device as a multi-touch interface that you use with both hands as you grip the device. To let the user visualize what they’re doing, they’ve projected the user’s fingers onto the screen, creating a translucent effect where you see the shadows of your fingers moving behind the screen and interacting with it.

Using the dual touch screen, you can zoom in and out of a map by pulling out and pushing in your fingers, rotate the map by spinning the screen like a disk, and type using a keypad broken into two halves where the fingers naturally lie. Check out the demo below:

This is not a massive idea, and I’m going to keep this short as apparently my posts are a bit too “essay”-like in length.

I was playing with the iPhone at the Apple store yesterday, and the novelty of some of their tricks to make the interface feel natural got me thinking about more ways you might be able to make devices easier to use.
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A new age of social networking is coming… to your cell phone. I don’t know when, but I do know it will come. It will start secretly (to you) on high school and college kids’ phones. It will likely involve sharing something that you feel is far too private to be publicly posted all over the place online. It will grow, and you will see it spreading to seemingly every teenager’s phone. Then one day, your Mom will announce that she’s signed up, and you’ll realize that somewhere along the way, this thing really became a new way to communicate.

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