king talk

After we reported about Microsofts new Xbox project called NATAL, we have to tell about about this new concept for that console. It´s called Milo, a little 3D avatar boy which could be your new friend. You can share your problems with him, go outside in his world, play around and have fun with Milo. The real world is connected to the virtual one via 3D gesture recognition. You even can draw something, share it with Milo and talk about it… Maybe you can use another outstanding project from Microsoft called Songsmith to sing together with Milo. Everything is possible with this extraordinary masterpiece of absurdity.

Come on Microsoft… What´s wrong with you? It looks like you want to create a tool for all the little Bill Gates nerds which are unable to feel real emotions while they are having a real talk to real people making real fun in this really extra evil world. Well done!

via SimpleAndOpen

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

As we saw the brand new video from Microsoft X-Box follow-up project called Natal, which is featuring a brend new gesture based interface, we thought about the mail from 3dv-systems (10th of April 2009)…

We were asking for the possibility to get a ZCam, which is able to track motion in 3d space, for tinkering purposes and they gave us the following answer:

»3DV Systems Ltd can today confirm it has entered a “definitive agreement” for its assets to be acquired by a third party. The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2009 and there is no assurance that this transaction will be completed. No further details will be confirmed at this time. Under these circumstances, we are unable to provide you with additional cameras or engage in business discussions.«

It seems to us that this third party could be M$…

The Patient Monitoring User Interface concept is using WPF (Avalon) to show the possibilites of 3D transitions and animation for visualizing the correlation of the interface objects, e.g. the interface is folding objects to demonstrate the usage of a patients folder. Everything was programmed with Visual Studio and designed with Expression, allowing a high performance of the graphics (said Microsoft) and saving your company money and time, because software developer and interface designer should work better together.

Some may know the Zooming User Interface (ZUI) presentation of Seadragon and Photosynth by Blaize Aguiera at TED conference. Here comes one web application from the Memorabilia store of the Hardrock Café which should show you the possibilities of a ZUI.

Microsoft is intensifying its engagement for health care applications. The Patient Journey Demonstrator is visualizing the need of good interface design for medical applications.

With the Silverlight Airlines booking tool, the user can perform a search by dragging the airplane from city to city.

… was the topic of the free informative event held by Microsoft Germany at the department of Informatics at TU Munich. They wrote in their invitation that Microsofts wants to talk about the influence of a better user experience and how they want to improve it in the near future. It sounded good, so I signed in with low expectations, because i couldn´t imagine that they had something completely new popping out of their sleeves. The best talk of this event was held by Peter Kirchner (Program Manager ISV). He was talking about »modern user interfaces« and tried to push the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) which includes Visual Studio and Expression (Microsofts answer to Adobes Creative Suite).

Peter said something like… »In the 80´s there was the revolution of the desktop metaphor and the graphical user interface. Later the internet was getting more popular and is now still known as the web 2.0. The next challenge will be the development of more natural user interfaces and new ways of interacting with a device or application … In the future we will see more intuitive and easier to use applications. If you want to know what Microsofts new user experience will be, just look at the Surface table. The way like virtuality and reality is merging and how simple and direct the user can navigate are just some examples … If we compare Windows graphics with the work of game developers and how they forced the graphical performance to the maximum for visualizing rich graphics, we recognized that our graphics didn´t utilize the power of modern computers until now.«

Hmmm, what do you think about it?