Physical Interfaces: BumbTop, the iPhone and Leopard

Recently I rewatched Anand Agarawala's demo BumbTop at TED 2007. BumbTop is a three dimension cubicle desktop. Documents on the desktop have physical qualities like weight, size, light reflection etc. They can be stacked, flipped through, bumbed into and organized in ways more similar to a real world desktop.



What struck me in the demo was the audience's reception. Partly due to Anand's humorous presention style, but largely because of the surprise effect the interface holds, the audience was clapping, laughing, even cheering. When the iPhone was introduce in January there were tons of moments like these. When Steve Jobs first scrolled through a song list with the flip of his fingers, the audience erupted. It is the RE-cognition factor. In that instance we identify a resemblance between real life physical behavior and the onscreen simulation of such physicality. It is a magical moment.

At the WWDC 2007 Steve Jobs presented the latest beta release of Leopard, Apple's upcoming OS for Macintosh. For a long time I imagined Apple's designers to arrive at their user interface solution by cheer genius. It never occured to me that the might take their "inspiration" from others, even purchase UI solution like Coverflow (first introduce to the general public with iTunes 7) from Steelskies . With the release of Leopard it will be a standard way to view information in its redesigned Finder.


"Stacks" in Leopard's Desktop

Leopard continues and broadens its use of animation as a general interface element. The Dock tags on the new "stack" feature, which may have been borrowed from BumbTops stack function, but lacks its physicality. Other Leopard features show me the direction Apple's interfaces are headed. Coverflow, Time Machine, Stacks and Spaces are all feature that rely heavily on animation. At the heart of them is Core Animation, a set of animation routines offered to developers to easily produce animated interfaces.

Leopard looks fun to use, but generally feels light, digital and spacey (quite literally in Time Machine). Animations in Leopard accelerate and decrease in speed which is a quality taken from a real world physicality. There is a new quality of light and shadow peeking through the new 3d-ish Dock design, but compared to BumbTop there is no sense of weight. The reason for that might be that we are still using a mouse pointing device.
In BumbTop is strikes me as odd to manipulate objects imbued with weight using a mouse pointer which cannot return physical feedback that resembles pushing weighted objects around. In makes sense that Leopard lacks the physical quality of weight. Leopard will also run on the iPhone, where the manipulation of information is accomplish with your fingers. While weighted pressure on its multi-touch surface will have no bearing, speed of movement does and thus represents one more step in the direction of physical interfaces.

Wireless Power Transfer at MIT

Yesterday technologyreview.com published an article about wireless power transfer. MIT researchers were able to transfer electricity wirelessly to make a lightbulb light up.



I would love to lead a cable free existence! No more bulky charger cables to bring along on vacation and to the office? I'm sold!



In the article Professor Peter Fisher, one of the researchers, said: "As long as the laptop is in a room equipped with a source of wireless power, it would charge automatically without having to be plugged in. In fact, it would not even need a battery to operate inside such a room."







No batteries would make my labtop a lot lighter.... Then I remembered that I am already scared of the electro-magnetic fields of my cell phone. What about the safety of living organism in such equipped rooms? The thought of overhead coils charging my laptops, cell phones and light bulbs was starting to make me very uncomfortable.



Later I read a report on dailymail.co.uk. Dr Soljacic, one of the researchers said that:



"Most objects in the room - such as people, desks and carpets - would be unaffected by the electromagnetic field. But any objects designed to resonate with the electromagnetic field would absorb the energy[....] The researchers believe there is little to worry about on safety grounds, saying that magnetic fields interact weakly with living organisms and are unlikely to have any serious side effects."











Noticing the large amount of comments to the technologyreview.com article, I got curious. The comments were heated. People seemed very knowledgable about induction coils and called the project "dungheap" and "hype".



Kitk said:



" Systems like this can put out nasty little surges of vastly higher peak power than whatever is rated--mine burned a hole through insulated aluminum sheet metal. Sure, the new ones might control that, but ANYTHING that receives this power by coupling even a little, even at a microscopic level, can be cooked! I never tried my test a second time, because I knew if the transfer went wrong, I might light up and cook. Great lab trick, but like home nuclear reactors, not too wise."



Salammoniac was really familiar with the subject matter and furious about the hype:



"[...]45% efficiency is nothing to crow about. It's lousy, requiring 133 watts to drive a 60 watt bulb. On top of that, I bet that number is coil in to coil out efficiency, not wall socket to light bulb. A simple power cord will be at least 99% efficient, socket to bulb, more if you use a fatter cord. That's why we use wires, dummy.

Having this thing running all the time is the electromagnetic equivalent of turning on the fire sprinklers, so that whenever you are thirsty, all you have to do is hold out your cup."



That doesn't sound very convincing. We'll see in a few years time. In the meantime get a new Apple labtop. At least their magnetically attached power cords won't make you trip and kill yourself ... or your computer.