Walky’s interface is idiotproof – make your fingers walk and the robot walks, make a jumping gesture and the robot jumps, kick and the robot kicks. You can imagine how much easier it would be to teach people how to control robots using a system like this as opposed to something that uses an array of buttons, levers and knobs. Nintendo hit upon that idea too, and turned it into lots of money by creating the Wii. Hand over a gamepad to an inexperienced gamer and you’ll have to spend quite some time explaining the controls before the person gets the hang of it, but give that same person a Wii and he won’t even need your help because the input system is much more natural. But is gesture-based input really the simplest and most practical input system?

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I don’t know about you, but I’m gonna have to side with buttons, levers and knobs for now. If you watched the video you saw how freakin’ cumbersome the system was; there was simply too much effort needed for a simple command. Maybe gesture-based systems are okay for entertainment or educational purposes – Walky is indeed a fun way of introducing robotics to kids – but if I had to use a natural input system I’d rather it be a voice-operated one.

[via Plastic Pals]

As you can see from the picture above, Miller’s take on the next generation interface is a keyboard-sized multitouch pad, partnered with software that makes use of 10 fingers at once. But that’s not even half of Miller’s practical ideas. He also imagines an operating system that, instead of letting users clutter their screens with windows, imposes order by constraining the position, size, and movement of windows. Think it won’t work? You’d better watch Miller’s video for the rest of his 10 cents:

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You know what, screw you tengooey, man the narrator’s voice is hypnotic. Comforting. Soothing. He could be saying fruit gallop poncho for all I care. I think I’ll play this video until I fall asleep. Check out the 10/GUI website for more info.

[via digg]

The 16 x 8-foot interactive display allowed multiple visitors to simultaneously control audio, video, photos and other multimedia content using their hands to navigate.

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The installation was put together by Obscura Digital and commissioned by HP as part of an advertising campaign for the event.

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GUI Wiz Darren David was responsible for putting together the user interface using Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF.) According to David, the entire project was designed, developed an built in just four weeks.

[via Fresh Creation]

ZenZui’s differentiator is its unique “zooming” user interface which lets you quickly maneuver from one application or website to another. The interface features a grid of customizable “tiles” which provide links directly to the users areas of interest. Once a tile is chosen, the selected content immediately fills the mobile devices screen.

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Note the huge album art, and video playback is done in landscape mode to provide excellent widescreen movie viewing. The video also shows off the FM tuner capability (which now appears to support RDS for track and title information – cool!) and a sneak peek at the ability to share content between devices.

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The second video shows off the tune sharing ability a little better, which looks less like the streaming ability that was originally rumored, and more like the ability to download tracks from device to device. The latest word is that DRM will be used to make shared tracks expire or be limited to a certain number of plays.

[via Mobility Today via Gizmodo]

More details have emerged on Nintendo’s interface which will be broken up into “Channels.” Below are Nintendo’s descriptions of the channels:

Disc Channel: This channel allows users to play either Wii game discs or the entire library of Nintendo GameCube discs.

Mii Channel: Fun caricatured portraits created in this channel can be used as characters across a variety of Wii software. Portraits can be stored in a user

No real surprises here… The ability to pull up system menus while playing a game is really the only “new” thing for Sony, and this has already been done on the Xbox 360. There’s also no indication yet how navigation of downloadable content will work, but in all likelihood, they’ll try to do something to respond to the content services that are already present in the 360 with Live Marketplace and also expected for the upcoming Wii.

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[via VideoSift]

Technical Overview from Microsoft Research (PDF)