Computers are really cool and helpful, but when we’re on the computer, we can’t connect with each other; computers can’t really interact with humans.
“So the challenge and opportunity that lies ahead is how to get the computers out of computing,” said Mark Rolston, the chief creative officer at frog. Essentially, Rolston wants to personalize the experience of interacting with a computer, but also give more flexibility to a “computer user.”
Rolston came up with an innovative technology to tackle the human-computer interaction problem.
“The room is the computer,” he said. Users, he described could have a device that is something like Siri’s Voice recognition put into an earpiece. Users would then be able to interact with a projector in a room to create a screen whenever it was needed. The computer then, would be “decoupled” from the computing.
Most computers are composed machines, but…imagine a case where they are externalized resources in a room,” he said. “I can talk at it and wave at it, and maybe I have a keyboard or maybe there are screens or cameras around, but [the computers] compose in the moment as we need them, and they are no more ornate than we need.” Things such as figuring out what gestures are universal, or easy to perform repeatedly, as well as understanding how to tell a computer that has eyes and ears that you want to talk to it rather than the person next to you, are all things Rolston and designers are thinking about.
But as we interact with computers in a more human way, and they become smarter, Rolston wonders if we will hit a point where computers behaving in human ways — or doing things humans do — becomes creepy. Will computing hit that uncanny valley, where it becomes so human — but is still clearly not human — that it creeps us out? He cites a video of people riding in a Google car that drives itself, where the people are clearly freaked out, as an example of this.
For more information, look at: http://gigaom.com/2011/11/10/frog-roadmap-2011/
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