Karl at the DeCordova

Karl teaches me a lot about how “real people” use computers, and it’s fascinating. As a dancer, he has a kind of body intelligence that is spell-binding to watch, because it is beautiful and because I know I could never do it. I think his brain developed toward movement very early, and mine toward BASIC, so he has an extreme muscle memory that is very powerful and expressive. His favorite thing right now is mouse gestures, but I think the mouse is ultimately too simple of an input device for him. I believe there’s a missing interface paradigm and set of applications that could extend the self-expression of a mover just as Word extends self-expression of a writer. Marginalized and underfunded as dance may be, I’m learning that there are a lot of movers in the world, and that, as far as I can tell, few of them end up in computer science. The people writing code, myself included, are really writers and linguists—they’re stuck in their own heads. So anyone who wants to interact with or program computers with their whole body is, for the most part, out of luck.

The gamers are, of course, ahead of the interface curve. The Wiimote represents the biggest advance in input devices in a decade, I think, but it only tracks the movement of one limb, and on the software end it’s only scratching the surface. The current games emulate existing real world movement (golf, bowling)—they don’t let you code with movement, there’s no room to create new movement vocabularies. I’m ready for that; I think Karl is, too.

Along these lines, I saw Aza Raskin’s excellent talk “Death of the Desktop” at SXSW and he demoed two things that represent good steps away from the 25-year-old “desktop.” Why should the desktop die? Not because it’s old; because it is 3D: things are hidden and they should not be. We spend all day moving windows around. We spend all day looking for these files and applications that should just be right in front of our noses. Anything that is not direct content manipulation, Raskin posits, is wasted effort. Exposé helps, but doesn’t get us all the way there. And sure, you can boost your productivity by getting 2 or 3 monitors on your desk, but Raskin has a couple alternatives.

For today’s users, Raskin recommends Enso, his company’s Spotlight/Quicksilver app for Windows. It executes simple commands typed while the caps lock key is held down. It’s a CLI on crack. Good stuff, and in his demo he killed Explorer.exe just to show his app in place of the desktop, running on a blank screen.

But the real goodies came later in the talk, when Raskin demoed a Zoomable User Interface. It’s not really a product, but it’s cool! A ZUI is just a plane, often infinite, with all of your content on it: photos, documents, web pages, whatever. No desktop, no file browser per se, no icons, no “open” or “save” commands—just directly manipulable content everywhere you look. And as you work with your content, you develop a cognitive map of the content plane, so you can find things easily—eg. if I’m at my video album from SXSW, I’ll know that my recipes are generally to the left, and my new voicemails are up and to the far left.

Spore screenshot

But once again, the gamers are already way ahead of the operating system designers, training today’s children to use tomorrow’s laptops. Game designers have the luxury of creating entirely sovereign environments for their games, so they have a lot of flexibility. Many games are already ZUIs, both 2D and 3D. Will Wright’s Spore has a beautiful 3D ZUI. Raskin still hasn’t convinced me that 3D UIs are cognitively a bad idea; I think it really depends on the input device. Mice are not good for navigating 3D content, but something soon may be.