New technology and a user-interface revolution
Technology is continuing to offer new opportunities and creating new challenges for designers. What look’s to be the next big development in the digital world is multi-touch surfaces. These are already in use by the Microsoft’s Surface and the Apple iPhone.
The technology will allow its user to interact in a near physical sense, actually moving on screen objects with their fingertips. But what impressed me most was the way that Microsoft Surface allows this same level of interaction with certain objects placed on top of it. For example if a digital camera is placed on the ‘Surface’ it will scatter the images from the camera’s memory onto the ‘Surface’ top. Then allowing you to move them, re-size them, and even move them by dragging to another device such as a Microsoft Zune, which is also placed on the ‘Surface’.
Microsoft sees the ‘Surface’ having much wider application, and this is really exciting for designers. In one example they show it as a restaurant table, were a waiter places a drink on the table and advertising related to the drink surrounds the base of the glass.
This means that advertising must be well thought out and take into consideration how the people might interact physically with the different objects so that the advertising will always responds in the correct way, with the correct message. This is going to open the door to a whole new level of interaction, compared to now where on a average all that has to be considered is a click, to what seems to be the future, where movement, the involvement of other static objects and multiple users all must play a part in the development of a solution.
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