“Over a quarter-century ago, Xerox introduced the modern graphical user interface paradigm we today take for granted.
That it has endured is a testament to the genius of its design. But the industry is now at a crossroads: New technologies promise higher-bandwidth interaction, but have yet to find a truly viable implementation.
10/GUI aims to bridge this gap by rethinking the desktop to leverage technology in an intuitive and powerful way.”
From the 10/GUI website
The 10/GUI project’s concept video (as shown above) is described as aiming to inform, inspire, and start discussions. It is a indeed, a fascinating concept. The ideas behind increasing the input bandwidth of direct interaction is very unique, considering most similar ideas work only to increase the visual options available graphically to the end-user, rather than to increase the number of controls with which the end-user can simultaneously interact.
The video displays many graphical user interface controls with which we are already familiar, such as the scrollbar. With a multi-touch, or equivilent system of controls, where there are multiple points of interactions, many of these old control concepts may become redundant. In some cases, such as with the ‘kinetic’ scrolling/zooming present in many new touch-screen mobile phones (for example, the Apple iPhone, Nokia N97 and HTC Hero), this is already very much the case, and the older controls, that are retaining, are often done so only for familiarity and legacy purposes.
The hardware technology for the concept shown in the 10/GUI concept video is already possible, being an effective multi-touch sensitive panel without a screen. The only aspects that missing are the development of such a device, the writing of driver software for the portrayed multi-touch device, and a window manager built and configured to deal with the concepts. In many ways, the interfaces built for small screen net-books, in which all active windows are forcibly maximised to the full size of the screen (as in the Ubuntu net-book remix), is the closest we currently have to the 10/GUI concept.
What are your thoughts on 10/GUI? Also, what about the general future of human to computer interaction? Will we stick to the regular keyboard and mouse way of interacting while the graphical user interface remains in flux, or will there be huge developments in new interaction devices, such as the multi-touch system the 10/GUI concept proposes?
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