Garmin HUD Navigation

Nice idea. It would be great to see this as a common accessory for smartphone drivers:

STORY | GARMIN PR

Building Experiences with Glass. A 50-minute video on Glass app guidelines aimed at interested developers.

The post-smartphone era could provide a fresh start for many industry players. Look at this as a potential opportunity.

KEY MOBILE TRENDS: Post-smartphone era, Lifelogging, Augmented Reality, developers.
EVENT HORIZON: Four years.

Here's a video recommended for all app & service developers who might want to start thinking about the post-smartphone era of devices. I also recommend this for smartphone executives who need to keep on top of longer-term trends for threatening industry shifts. It's speculative, but it is a vision.

The user experience is very different with HUDs and will take some new approaches from UI designers and developers. There are certainly some re-skilling required.

PS: Please let's not start calling this a "technology disruption" five years down the road when we know all about it now.

Is an eye phone in your future? What effect will eye-put have on UI, games and other apps?

SENSEYETECH >>

Are we now near to eye input?

Eye tracking has been used as a form of input for military projects for years. But now the hardware and software enablers are in place to scale the concept down from multi-billion dollar fighter jet contracts to mid-level consumer handsets.

Here's one interesting implementation eye-put by a Danish stat-up called SenseyeTech. The companies eye-control software, called Senseye, uses the device's front-facing camera to track the user's eye movement. API's would allow developers to use eye focus for input such as unlocking the device, answering the phone, scrolling through web pages, and even for gaming input.

Touch input has dominated the smartphone market for the past three years, and while voice input is beginning to allow some supplemental interactions, the market has botten rather boring. Will eye-put offer device manufacturers some opportunity to offer a touch of wow in what has become one of the world's dullest markets? I'd say the eyes have it.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVCpUmLinXM

Haptics: touch... with feelings. Is this the next WOW opportunity?

Macworld STORY >>

Anybody in the handset biz who really cared about technology developments and who knew how to click on a YouTube link should have expected the potential impact of multi-touch. Well before Apple announced the first iPhone, Jeff Han, who was a research scientist at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, wrote of and showed demonstrations of multi-touch interfaces. To make matters more painful for some current handset vendors other than Apple, some of that work was partially funded by some leading software and handset vendors of the day.

Here's the rule guys: you snooze, you lose.

Now a new level of touch input could be fast approaching. Literally a new level. Haptics. I first started hearing about haptics back in 2005. Haptics had the potential to add feeling to touch screens. Some great use cases were floating around, like read keyboards popping up out of touch screens, or joysticks that could change. Buttons could raise and recede as needed. The touch world meets the click world.

There are lots of rumors (and backed by solid evidence such as patent applications) that Apple will be implementing haptics in a future generation of iOS devices.


Multi-touch was the WOW in iPhone 1.0. To the untrained eye, it did look like nothing before it. Apple touched the audience like nobody before it. And the competition could only stare at the the on-coming headlights.

There hasn't been much WOW in the market since then in my opinion. Will haptics be the next great thing to stand out? Perhaps. And then get ready for the shouda, coulda, woulda's.


Will haptics raise the bar?

Get ready to Touch & Hover! Is this the evolution of touch? Sony’s new “floating touch” input method hits the nail on the head.

MOBILE GAZETTE STORY >>

Most Android handsets look pretty much alike to me. And I don’t blame the vendors for this general lack of form factor innovation. In this game of follow the leader, there’s little reward in thinking different.

But this isn’t to say there’s no opportunity to improve the block screen experience with a touch of wow here and there.

Sony’s new Xperia sola is a typical Android device from a tier one vendor. It has a 3.7-inch 480 x 854 display, a 1GHz dual-core processor, and blah, blah, blah.
But Sony’s addition of “floating touch” deserves special attention that it probably won’t get. The idea of sensing by hovering has been around, but it’s nice to see what could be a sold real-world implementation. This addresses the problem of requiring a surgeon’s precision with some touch tasks, such as browsing busy pages with many small links. I suspect that “floating touch” is a feature users have been longing for.

Note also the NFC SmartTags feature and accessories which allows users to easily pair and set locale customization.

There are some sweet details here. Best of luck to Sony in making the show.

How will Microsoft handle the growing problem of “Pinflation?” WP7's Live tiles makes it too tempting.

Dedicated Windows Phone 7* users know this problem well: wall-to-wall tiles. They just keep growing, and growing, and growing.

Live Tiles in Windows Phone is a great feature for sure. These widget-like large, square icons can change to reflect the content underneath. Weather tiles that are constantly updated. Traffic tiles. Radio station tiles. Reminder tiles. E-mail inbox tiles. News tiles. Financial tiles. Map tiles. Oh, miles and miles and miles of tiles.

Let’s call the problem "Pinflation:" the extremely tempting and somewhat addictive ability to pin anything and everything to the homescreen in WP7.

So from a usability point of view, I have to wonder if Microsoft has some plan to stuff the worms back in the can. Live Tiles are smooth, but I wonder if they can be a little bit organized.

Miles and miles and miles of tiles. Has Microsoft created a monster?

Tongue in cheek: Rovio reaches new heights as it grows by leaps and bounds. Don’t try boxing them in. This is for real.

O Rovio, Rovio! wherefore art thou Rovio?

Where art they? Where art they not? They art u-beak-uitous.

No, Helsinki has no fury like a she-bird scorned.

So, how about those Angry Birds -- they are breaking out, and breaking free. There’s no holding them down now. It looks like the sky’s the limit for Finland-based Rovio.

It’s an amazing success story of a company that found the ability to fly high because they refused to be boxed in. They aren’t just a game maker: Rovio has created a parallel world of crime and punishment. A world full of bitter-sweet revenge. They catapulted themselves onto the world stage by challenging the audience with beautiful simplicity. We can all learn something from Rovio.

So, here’s to the smashing success that is Rovio. It must be music to their ears. Let the party begin... and roll the tape:

Rovio is reaching new levels.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzIBZQkj6SY

So, is it now time to get SERIous about voice UI? Listen up or get out of the way.

What's that you say?

When it comes to foresighting, the great unknown about any development is consumer adoption. When? If?

Last week I wrote about the potential trend of voice input for smartphones (see "Speak now, or forever hold your piece"). I understand that bad user experiences until now may have left a bad taste in consumers' mouths when it comes to voice UI. But it wasn't many years ago when I heard some ludicrous arguments against the use of touch-screen input. And then some handset vendors got left out in the cold.

I've gotten a few e-mails about my last voice UI entry and why they would have no interest in using voice as an input method on their handset. I say, listen carefully: if the platform you're pushing doesn't do things like this soon, you're about to miss another form factor: non-touch.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNsrl86inpo

Speak now, or forever hold your piece. Is voice the new touch?

Voice Actions for Android, Google Blog post >>

It's time to speak up. It's time to be heard!

Touch devices didn't storm onto the marketplace in 2007. Rather, there was a decade of light showers of touch. Devices of all sorts were breaking in consumers to a touch-input world: ticket machines at airports, ATMs, cars, palm pilots. It was slow going for a while, but now the majority of smartphones sold come with touch displays.

After using verbal input in Google Maps on Android, I'm convinced the same is about to happen with voice input for phones. And like touch input, we've been broken into the concept of voice input for years now, shouting instructions into telephone menu systems, looking up names in feature phones, voice Googling on the PC, and even talking to cars.

Most smartphone platforms currently support voice input of one sort or another, whether it be at the application or OS level. For the most part, it borders on amazing, especially for native speakers of a supported language. Try, for example, Nuance on iOS or Voice Actions on Android. Try voice searching (voicing?) for a complex address in Google Maps for mobile. You'll be sold.

So Tellme something: are you ready to start talking?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsI76lrvJt4

Hey automakers, you're driving me crazy. It's time for auto manufacturers to make a dash towards clarity.

When it comes to usability, it seems that automakers are going in reverse. Who will become the Apple of the auto industry? There's opportunity here for somebody.

A few weeks back I rented a Ford Focus, a compact car with an expansive user interface. Ford clearly stuffed a PC into the dashboard, not because it was useful, but because they could. The car had one screen, and then another, and even another. It had irritating glowing lights and buttons and more buttons and menus and sub-menus and sub-sub-menus. You had to dial and press and select and dig and find and figure. At times I was certain a DOS-prompt would pop up. Ford together with partner Microsoft took the simple and obvious and made it confusing and obscure. And this in an environment in which clarity could be a life-or-death situation.

When it comes to stuffing technology into a device, it seems the auto industry is going through the same growing pains that handset vendors went through earlier last decade. Car makers have discovered feature creep as if it were a good thing, and they are driving it hard onto the consumer.

I have to wonder if the auto industry has taken any notice of what has happened in the smartphone market, and how quickly vendors can be leapfrogged when a sleeker UI comes along. It's good to learn from your own mistakes; it's better to learn from the mistakes of others.

For your consideration, please check out this Engadget video (the link opens in a new tab) of a ludicrous concept in-car user interface from Volvo. All knobs and buttons are replaced with screens and menus with the goal of "cleaning up" to create a "nice, clean interior." But clutter comes in many forms. After watching the Volvo video, watch the hilarious "Macbook Wheel" video embedded at the bottom of this post by the Onion. "Everything is just a few hundred clicks away." Was this Volvo's inspiration for their "clean" UI?

Here's some advice for automakers: it's time to Focus on usability. We drivers can take the clutter of big, clearly-marked buttons. And for smartphone vendors, there's some great opportunity here to correct the mistakes being made by Ford, Volvo and their contemporaries. Give them a crash course in usability.


A mad dash toward tech heavy. Does Ford know how to Focus on usability?
The vast, space-aged, mind-boggling interface of a Ford. Blue screens of death?



Volvo's concept UI. It seems like everything is just a few hundred clicks away.
Is Volvo giving customers features they don't even realize they want?
(Click on the PIC below to watch the video. It opens in a new tab.)

http://www.viddler.com/explore/engadget/videos/3176/


Is this "the Onion" video Volvo's inspiration for their hi-tech interior?
"With the Macbook Wheel... everything is just a few hundred clicks away."
"...giving cutsomers features they don't even realize they want..."
Alternative link if the embedded video below doesn't work:
http://www.theonion.com/video/apple-introduces-revolutionary-new-laptop-with-no,14299/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8gF0KTfMrQ
or see http://www.theonion.com/video/apple-introduces-revolutionary-new-laptop-with-no,14299/