Touchable Holography - feeling raindrops

Mid-air displays have been seen in Science Fiction movies for several decades. As an example of this interactive holographic experience, the recreational “Holodeck” in Star Trek, instantly springs to mind. 

While holograms already exist as virtual objects hovering in front of the user, you cannot touch and feel this object. However, amazingly the University of Tokyo is now demonstrating touchable holography, an emerging technology that brings with it the sensation needed to complete the interactive experience between user and object. For example, when the raindrop hits the user’s palm, he feels tactile sensation. And in another demonstration the user sees and feels a small virtual creature running on his palm.

These are definitely early days, but this opens up call kinds of opportunities for how we interface with applications, games, and even each other.

Watch the video below to see the technology working!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related posts:

1. VisionAire Multi-touch Holograms
2. U-Tsu-Shi-O-Mi Virtual Humanoid
3. Palm Pre Video Capture Test

1. Recruiting Unsuitable Participants
It’s vital that you validate a design through the eyes of your user. But who are your users? Work with marketing folks to understand your target audience, and screen potential participants accordingly.  If you have recruited participants that are too advanced, they might not uncover usability issues that a more typical user might experience.  Regardless of how good the moderator might be, if you don’t have suitable and relevant participants, you won’t be getting an accurate usability assessment.

2. Not identifying the Critical Tasks
Have you identified the primary use cases and goal-oriented tasks?  Really think critically here, and focus on the  most important ones only. Hopefully you have already designed the user interface around these tasks, so bring them into the test. Write a test script that includes a moderator guide, and provide context to the tasks. Make users feel like they are in a real-life situation by telling them a story.E.g. “It’s 5 days before Christmas and you need to buy your nephew in Germany a Nintendo Wii”. Critical tasks are not only a usability concern, they’re equally impactful on the business. 

3. Testing Too Much For Too Long
Don’t feel like you have to test every single aspect of a user interface, nor every single possible task. Focus on what’s critical and if necessary, break the test into multiple phases. After 45 minutes or so, most users will tire and will have trouble focusing. So keep the sessions to under an hour if possible.

4. Allowing Participants to be Designers
As a general rule of thumb, you should be looking for what participants DO more than what they say. It’s OK to ask what their impressions are, especially when comparing a new design against an old one. Just be careful about taking their feedback literally.  E.g. A user may have a personal preference for red, and suggest that all buttons should be red and flashing. Now, taking this feedback literally could actually introduce usability issues. Observe, filter and interpret.

5. Asking Too Many Questions
Keep in mind that a usability test should be focused primarily on task completion, navigation, comprehension, and interaction. While it’s OK to ask some questions to understand how satisfied they are with the experience, most of the findings should be derived through observation and not questioning.

While these are what I consider the top 5 mistakes made, there are many more to consider. What other common mistakes would you add to this list?

Related posts:

1. Interview: Amy Buckner on Mobile Usability
2. Usability Study suggests Bing topples Google?
3. 20 User Experience Books you should own

What are your top 5 User Experience books?

1. Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World
   by Peter Merholz
2. Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning
   by Dan Brown
3. Contextual Design: A Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Designs (Interactive Technologies)
   by Hugh Beyer
4. Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience
   by James Kalbach and Aaron Gustafson
5. Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices (Voices That Matter)
   by Dan Saffer
6. Designing for the Social Web (Voices That Matter)
   by Joshua Porter
7. Designing Interfaces
   by Jenifer Tidwell
8. Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design
   by Robert Hoekman Jr.
9. Designing Web Interfaces
   By Bill Scott
10. The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web (Voices That Matter)
    by Jesse James Garrett
11. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites
    by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville
    
12. A Project Guide to UX Design: For user experience designers in the field or in the making
    by Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler
13. Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition
    by Steve Krug
14. Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics (Interactive Technologies)
    by Thomas Tullis
15. Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design
    by Bill Buxton
16. Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior
    by Indi Young
    
17. Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions
    by Tim Ash
    
18. Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks
    by Luke Wroblewski
19. The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
    by Dan Roam
    
20. Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research
    By Mike Kuniavsky

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1. 10 Books to becoming an Idea Generating Machine
2. Caution: 5 Common Usability Testing Mistakes to Avoid
3. Wearable Technology, the next User Experience Frontier

To better understand the Pre’s design and differentiators, I caught up with user experience colleague Michelle Koh, a member of the human interface team at Palm. She played a large part in designing the user experience for Palm’s new WebOS platform and the core Person Information Management (PIM) applications that Palm is legendary for. Specifically, she designed the global device search, phone, and contact applications, as well as contributing to the overall device navigation and system UI design.

BRADLEY HEBDON: You haven’t always designed mobile experiences. Why did you make the transition from web to mobile?

MICHELLE KOH: There are probably several reasons why I made the move to mobile. Firstly, there is something magical in canonizing all the design thought and work into an actual physical product that people can touch and I wanted to get close to that process.

Then there’s the impact a mobile experience has. It’s frequent and daily, and therefore makes an impact to people in their everyday life.

Curiosity is another reason. Why is my phone like this? How come it’s so hard to use? Wouldn’t it be better if it could……

BH: I think most users have been used to a very poor mobile user experience until the iPhone came along. Perhaps your frustration drove you?

MK: I’ve always had a healthy dose of “dissatisfaction”, so yes.

BH: What else pulled you into the mobile space?

MK: I had a desire to get out of my comfort-zone and design in an industry, medium, and technology where I would have to learn from others and also contribute from my own experiences.

Also, I recognized the social and technology blips on the radar and had a wishy-washy feeling that the Smartphone was the next milestone in this information age. So I wanted to adopt it and adapt my design thinking and skills.

BH: Now that you’ve immersed yourself in designing for the mobile experience, do you have anything in mind going forward?

MK: My next area of focus might be to try and find meaningful and useful ways to breed the web and mobile experiences together … it’s vague … but vagueness is typically the starting point for further discovery and viability. I think we are seeing really good glimpses of this with the web version of Facebook and the iPhone version of Facebook.

BH: What were the biggest challenges in moving from web to mobile?

MK: My biggest challenge in making this transition was honestly a personal one filled with excitement, doubt, and uncertainty. When I started my career in web, it fortunately coincided with the birth of the “web designer” and so as this field was maturing, I was as well. I couldn’t get a degree in this so I taught myself and learned from others in the same position. I learned everything as it was being invented, ingested the innovations, and practiced them. I hope I can say this without sounding prideful and self-proclaimed, but I became pretty good at it.

BH: So you were in a comfortable place then?

MK: Yes. At that point, it was easy to stay where I was comfortable. But I was once told that your biggest challenge as a designer is when you take a leap. So I jumped! And so transitioning to mobile was a challenge in that I did not mature in this industry, relatively, there was more that I did not know, it’s very technical in nature, and I doubted myself. The challenge was more personal. Right now, it’s so exciting to be in this chaos of change but it is challenging.

BH: Speaking of exciting, the upcoming release of Palm’s Pre must represent a climax to what must have been a thrilling time for you and the design team.  And it seems the pundits are matching up the Pre against the iPhone, how do you think the Pre differs from the iPhone?

MK: I remember when i saw the first mock-up of this over a year ago. The inner industrial designer in me screamed “brilliant”! The slight curve felt comfortable in my hand and when I slid open the device, the curve line was further emphasized so that I could cradle it against my ear. And the keyboard is hidden away when I don’t need it. You don’t expect curves on devices so this was a delightful design decision that I appreciate a great deal. The curves are reinforced in the overall footprint down to the keyboard, which gives it a sense of harmony.

BH: One of the first things people will notice is the Pre’s keyboard. Do you see it as an advantage over the iPhone?

MK: Having used a virtual keyboard on the iPhone for over a year now, I think that the physical vs. virtual keyboard battle is actually a preference issue. I’ve become very good at using my screen keyboard and can type very fast. I also like using the Pre’s keyboard because I make fewer errors. Both benefits are on par but there is an advantage to a physical keyboard … screen real estate! What could be used for valuable information is taken up by the virtual keyboard on my iPhone, which in my experience is a poor one.

BH: Can you tell me about the Touchstone wireless charger?

MK: This is just so cool because what was only possible in movies, is now possible in real-life for a mass consumer product. It’s always exciting when something considered “geek” becomes “chic”. Not only does this matter in the way a device is charged, but also for human behavior and cognition. I actually don’t like to charge my iPhone because I don’t like the weird stress I feel in jamming my phone into a charger. I can’t explain it, it’s just visceral. But how fluid and stress-free it is to simply place the device on the Touchstone … this is natural movement … back to being human.

BH: The Touchstone is definitely a differentiator. I’d like to see something like this re-charge a few devices at a time.  What else do you think separates the Pre from the iPhone?

MK: I’m not an operating system expert, but in my last two jobs in the mobile industry, I’ve learned that the platform matters BIG time. I learned early that an out-dated platform was the bane of so many phones for too long and helped me understand why my cell phone experience was so poor. From a user experience standpoint, the platform is what enables single-tasking to multi-tasking … the biggest elephant probably in iPhone meetings these days. And if I’m not wrong, what makes the hybrid of RIMs Blackberry Storm plus “touch” interface so horribly wrong. A killer OS is key, and in the Pre’s case it’s WebOS.

BH: I’ve seen the term “Synergy” being mentioned quite a bit. What is this?

MK: When I started designing around integration with Facebook and web PIM data, I just wanted to solve a reoccurring problem I had, especially when it came to personal information management (PIM) data. I wanted to work with content that I had already created … and not recreate it. I didn’t want to care about where the data was as long as I could get it. I didn’t want to manage my contacts and spend needless hours configuring an application especially when everyone is doing this already with their own personal data anyways (i.e. Facebook profiles). Palm has been calling this “Synergy” and this will be key for future technology. Not only for mobile but for devices like netbooks which will have limited hardware bandwidth.

BH: Personally, I think the browser is one of the most important ingredients in a mobile experience – how does the Pre perform in this area?

MK: I’ve seen internal side-by-side comparisons of the Palm Pre browser vs. iPhone Safari browser and let me say that the new browser is simply awesome. Navigating pages is a breeze thanks to the WebOS card environment. Flash is going to be really exciting as this has been long anticipated. With so many websites built in or with components of flash, the need to browse them on my device is be even more critical.

BH: What do you mean by “WebOS card environment”?

MK: Oh, that’s a feature that enables a user to quickly flick through applications, as you would with a deck of cards.

BH: So that’s part of the multitasking capabilities?

MK: Yes, that’s right.

BH: That sounds like a great example of how a real-life metaphor was brought into the experience.  How is Palm encouraging the development of applications for the Pre?

MK: How good and fast can a designer build something with a new set of tools never used before? Now … how good and fast can a designer build something, with tools they have experience with, their friends have experience with, and the community is drenched in? As the age old saying goes, Palm didn’t “reinvent the wheel”, we just rolled the wheel in a different direction creating new pathways with familiar tools like HTML, CSS, and Javascript to leverage a web-centric technology.

BH: From what I’ve seen so far, the user interface looks fantastic; even better than the iPhone’s! What were the guiding principles that ultimately drove the architecture and aesthetic?

MK: We always wanted to make sure that we loved the product, the interface, and the experience. As a designer, you have to be invested in the product experience and to also consider it a major driving force in certain situations. The design shouldn’t be totally self-referential but there is a place for it when it’s defining an original archetype and setting a new bar. I think that is the situation we were in.

BH: Now that the release of the Pre is imminent, will you be working on any future Palm devices?

MK: It would have been nice to continue my stay with Palm because of my great colleagues and the rare break-through opportunities.  However since the company is in Silicon Valley and my home and family are in Los Angeles, it was not personally and logistically sensible in the long run.

I feel grateful to have had the support and opportunity to contribute to Palm for almost a year and a half and I hope to have contributed to the “Zen of Palm” come-back (Google this) while elevating the mobile experience for Palm users. I really do hope the users will be happy.  That really was my main goal.

BH: So what’s next then?

MK: What’s next? I guess I can answer that question with another question.  What’s next in this information and technology driven age?

Along with mobility, social networking seems like it’s here to stay.  I mentioned earlier in our conversation that I found the intersection of web, mobile, and social networking a land with more to discover.  That intersection is small right now, but the trends seem to be saying that it’ll get even bigger … and since we’re in LA, what if we throw music into the mix?

BH: You’re intersecting social networking with mobile?

MK: Actually, my next opportunity is to contribute at MySpace Music in the area of user experience. This is a relatively new joint venture with a handful of major music labels seeking to create an empowering economy for fans, artists and labels.  In this industry and company, the aspirations are big, the challenges great, and the competition fierce.  With this, MySpace Music needed someone dedicated to UX so I am the first in the group to solely make it my job to do so and contribute to the evolution for MySpace Music.  Wish me luck!

BH: This sounds like an incredible opportunity Michelle. Congrats!

MK: It’s been great chatting with you Brad. Thanks for giving me this forum to reflect and share my design work experiences with others.

BH: Absolutely, thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule, and all the best with your move.

I think it’s fair to say that, there hasn’t been this kind of anticipatory buzz in the market, since the iPhone’s launch two years ago. And while the iPhone raised the user experience bar significantly, it’s devices like the Palm Pre that will continue to keep the bar elevated and the competition fierce. That kind of healthy rivalry results in a win-win for consumers and user experience professionals alike.

Finally, let us not forget that when Palm re-enters the fray as its second coming, the true saviors are the designers behind the Pre, and not merely the device itself.

You can find Michelle on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/michellekoh

Related posts:

1. Palm Pre arrives June 6 for $200
2. Palm Pre: on the heals of the iPhone
3. Palm Pre Video Capture Test

Obscura Digital has teamed their special multi-touch software with the Musion Eyeliner Hologram Projection System to produce an amazing interactive tool for presenters to use whereby they can manipulate 3-D holographic images in the air. Aptly called VisionAire, the single or multiple users can shrink, zoom and turn the images by simply moving their hands.

It’s best not to toss out the laser pointer just yet as the expense and scope of this technology is clearly earmarked for large scale presentations. But it’s cool to know handling holograms like this is not just the stuff of movies like Minority Report.

Related posts:

1. The iBar: The World's First Multi-touch Bar
2. Touchable Holography, an Emerging Technology
3. Nintendo Wii 2.0: A mind-controlled console

Moving away from sloppy remotes, Nintendo Wii is entering the brainwave era with a slick mind-controlled console. At least this is the thrilling desire of hi-tech dreamers over at T3 Magazine who want to see jaws dropping and brain cells working their way through gaming.

The ground-breaking concept, part of the magazine’s future tech feature, introduces the idea of a Wii headset accessory that allows the mind of the user to control edgy characters through the popular action games and sporting events. Also featuring immersive in-ear headphones for enhanced experience, the cutting-edge Nintendo will be able to capture the brainwaves of the excited gamer and turn it into a digital action in the cyber world.

Inspired by the revolutionary Emotiv wireless device, the Nintendo Wii 2.0 relies on technology that is not simply a spark in the science fiction sphere.

Could this bring a whole new meaning to the word, “Couch Potato”? At least with the current Wii, folks are up-and-about, burning calories, twisting ankles and breaking HD TV’s.

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Designed by Sung Woo Park, the cutting-edge device is a portable text scanning tool, utilizing the OCR function to identify text and convert this information into voice. This advanced technology allows visually impaired people to read everything from books and newspapers to mail and business cards.

Could this mean the death of braille?

Related posts:

1. Google Voice converts Voicemail to Text

A cell is shown loaded with sodium-selective nanosensors. A similar injectable nanoink is under development that would appear purple when glucose levels are low

A special tattoo ink that changes color based on glucose levels inside the skin is under development by Massachusetts-based Draper Laboratories. The injectable nanotech ink could eventually free diabetics from painful blood glucose tests.

“It doesn’t have to be a large, over-the-shoulder kind of tattoo,” said Heather Clark, a scientist at Draper. “It would only have to be a few millimeters in size and wouldn’t have to go as deep as a normal tattoo.”

Initial tests of the sodium-detecting ink in mice have had “spectacular” results, according to Clark. Testing the glucose monitoring nanotech ink in mice could begin by the end of this month.

Consumers will have to wait. Clark estimates that it will be at least two years before the necessary human testing is complete to bring the ink to the market.

While this has huge potential as an alert delivery system, I wonder if there’s any possibility of this becoming a true user interface, whereby the user would be able to not only monitor information, but provide input too.  In this application, the tattoo alerts users to the glucose levels, but could it also allow them to rectify the situation via a few taps to the tattoo?

Related posts:

1. Apple working on 3D Mac OS X user interface

Kindle 2 features:

• Slim: Just over 1/3 of an inch, as thin as most magazines
• Lightweight: At 10.2 ounces, lighter than a typical paperback
• Wireless: 3G wireless lets you download books right from your Kindle, anytime, anywhere; no monthly fees, service plans, or hunting for Wi-Fi hotspots
• Books in Under 60 Seconds: Get books delivered in less than 60 seconds; no PC required
• Improved Display: Reads like real paper; now boasts 16 shades of gray for clear text and even crisper images
• Longer Battery Life: 25% longer battery life; read for days without recharging
• More Storage: Take your library with you; holds over 1,500 books
• Faster Page Turns: 20% faster page turns
• Read-to-Me: With the new Text-to-Speech feature, Kindle can read every book, blog, magazine, and newspaper out loud to you
• Large Selection: Over 230,000 books plus U.S. and international newspapers, magazines, and blogs available
• Low Book Prices: New York Times Best Sellers and New Releases $9.99, unless marked otherwise

For reading traditional books, I won’t be lining up to get one of these things, and not because of the high price point. To me, there’s something unique about reading a book. The smell of the ink, the tactile experience of paper beneath fingers, the ability to break it in and make it your own – with “doggy ears” and all. A book develops character over time, can be given as a gift, inscribed, written on, etc, etc.

However, for reading blogs and other digital media — why not give it a try! Kindle: Amazon’s 6″ Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation)

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View full article here, which includes a series of sketches. Interesting stuff!

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