Tangible UI and Minority Report
In his blogpost about “unconscious gestures”, at a certain point, Matt Jones has a good rant about the cultural ownership on the touch interface of the iphone. As if all the other products which use touch/gestures had been copied (”with pride”):
“That last remark made me spit with anger - and I almost posted something very intemperate as a result. The work that all the teams within Nokia had put into developing touch UI got discounted, just like that, with a half-thought-through response in a press conference. I wish that huge software engineering outfits like S60 could move fast enough to ‘copy with pride’.
Sheesh.
Fact-of-the-matter is if you have roughly the same component pipeline, and you’re designing an interface used on-the-go by (human) fingers, you’re going to end up with a lot of the same UI principles.
But Apple executed first, and beautifully, and they win. They own it, culturally.“
Why do I blog this? speaking of cultural ownership, what is even more puzzling is all the press about the prominence of “minority report” in terms of interface paradigm.
As if every single gestural/touch UI that we have today have something to do with Minority Report, as if that movie taught people that it was where innovation in that field started. So you have newspaper article about the phone/table/display that-mimics-minority-report-gestural-interface. It’s really weird since the interface employed by Tom Cruise et al. are very different. There is really something here about the normative future created by a cultural artifact such as movies and tv series.
Apart from that, Matt’s also complains about the fact that what is pursued is more “deliberate touch interfaces - touch-as-manipulate-objects-on-screen rather than touch-as-manipulate-objects-in-the-world for now“, which is a relevant remark.
November 19th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
Johnny Mnemonic came out in 1995, seven years before minority report, and featured what I thought was an even better manipulate objects UI . I guess Steven Spielberg is to Robert Longo as Apple is to whoever.
November 21st, 2007 at 3:09 pm
Well, Minority Report is an interesting one because Spielberg assembled a panel of “experts” from MIT to brainstorm the future tech he was going to show. This included Jaron Lanier, Neil Gershenfeld, Stewart Brand, and William Mitchell.
So in a way the vision they put forward was a summary of the state-of-the-art of futures thinking at that time (2001), albeit seen through an MIT lens.
There’s a whole range of ideas in there from transport to biometrics as well as the user interface stuff, but the movie was so huge that I guess we could point to Minority Report as being a recent entry point for gestural interfaces into the techno-social imaginary. In the UK there was even a campaign of TV ads by M & C Saatchi that emulated the gestures stuff pretty closely, featuring a young woman dressed in a tight-fitting black suit, in some kind of call centre of the future, answering queries by waving her hands around in space. The tagline of the ads was “The Future for Less”. I found them quite funny, but there’s no arguing with the penetration of TV advertising.
Article by Lanier: http://www.21cmagazine.com/minority.html
Some MIT blurb: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2002/underkoffler-0717.html
Cinema.com Production notes (scroll to half way): http://www.cinema.com/articles/1025/minority-report-production-notes.phtml
November 21st, 2007 at 3:11 pm
btw the UK TV ads were for Dixon’s, a high street electrical retailer (since defunct).