king talk

There have been a lots of rumours the last weeks about a new Apple MacBook Touch Tablet Computer heated up by Gizmodo and their 100% source. After all here comes Microsoft with its own concept for a tablet called »Courier« (using a font without counters… little punks).

The interactions are really inspired by the iPhone. It´s all about the smooth sliding-wiping-dragging-dropping-zooming way of controlling this device.

They idea of combining a touchscreen with a second tool (pen) is not new, but I like it. The pie menu looks a little bit old-fashioned, but I think this will be redesigned for a possible series product.

After product innovations like the Apple AirBook the product design of the CourierTablet looks really heavy. This should be redesigned as well. After that prototpye it´s 1:0 for Microsoft within the race for a mobile tablet computer. We will see how the answer of Apple will look like… I hope that the insider informations are wrong and the body should not just look like a bigger iPhone. Urgh…

via Gizmodo

Narrated by Tom Selleck, and directed by Fight Club’s David Fincher, the ads began in 1993 and were (mostly) remarkably accurate, predicting: E-Books, in-car GPS, tablet PCs, E-ZPass, video conferencing and video on demand. Take a look…

via Gizmodo

Alright, so here’s our future according to Nokia: we are wearing clunky bracelets at night, are permanently stalked by some weird guy and our communication will heavily rely on emoticons. On the plus side: we won’t have to readjust our behavior because data structures will still be navigated using text menus.

So even though Nokia deserves appreciation for coming out with a future scenario in the first place, it is sad that they apparently didn’t have the will to make it coherent. To me, it seams like they had a great vision which then has been gradually watered down in order to make everyone in the company somewhat happy. This is sad, but it’s even sadder that this kind of creative destructivism is something quite common in todays industry.

(via Jens Franke)

The american computer developer Apple wants to patent a technique, which allows the transmission of the user motion to the screen. Apple submitted an application in December 2007 at the US patent office.  The patent was published last week, it´s officially called “Motion Tracking User Interface”.

This technique can match the movement of defined objects like your head, hand or an ordinary object like a cup of coffee to a virtual object at your desktop. Apple mentioned that e.g. the motion of your head could rotate a 3-dimensional teapot on your screen. Nowadays we use mouse, keyboard, graph tablet or trackball to interact with our computers, but for every device the hand of the user is needed. This technology should help the user to navigate without using both hands.

Apple published a patent some weeks ago, where they merged a display with image sensors. This could be the fundamental technology for the motion tracking. The whole patent is the answer to the 3D tracking system of 3DVsystems called Z-Cam, which was actually aquired by competitor Microsoft and will be used in the Natal project, which was shown at this years E3 gaming conference in Los Angeles.

via heise

This months edition of PAGE, a famous german design magazine, is featuring its new special interest magazine for interactive design called weave, with a 38 page strong preview. Weave will be all about web design, conceptual design and the development of new media.

Jens Franke wrote an excellent leading article about the »Generation Interactive«. He questions: »What are the next interactions beyond Wii and iPhone? And how will Designers and Developers be influenced by that changes?« At page 14 you can find a quote about prototyping from one of our team members Thomas Gläser. It´s just one statement of our philosophy, which asserts that »prototyping will help you to step back from restrictions of current design software which is limiting your work. Quick and dirty mockups can give you an early insight about the quality of the interaction with a device or application.«

The first edition of weave will be published in September. You can pre-order here…