Nokia's bendable displays

Nokia has been working on bendable displays for a while, and have now managed to go from concept to working demonstrator for this technology. The 'Nokia Kinetic' concept is a flexible rectangular device with a bendable touch screen. They kept interaction simple by using only twisting and horizontal bending motions as input, besides touching and sliding. Especially bending the device in order to zoom in and out seems a very natural mapping from action to function, as you either press away or bring closer the center of the screen.

Another device that Nokia has presented with this concept is a beautiful borderless flexible display. This display is embedded in a soft and transparent skin-like material that can detect a finger pressing into it and then stretching the skin in various directions. This may greatly enrich and simplify browsing interactions.



The Nokia Kinetic gives us a good glimpse of where our technological devices are headed. Softer, more expressive, and no more being confining us only to rapid sequential movements for input, technology is about to engage more of our bodily skill. Instead of the miniaturization of devices, there might be more potential in fitting our technology better to our bodies, and making it soft and adaptable.

Watch the movies here:

A virtual boy who might be the best friend you'll ever have

Ok, so we're all going crazy about the nearing of the release of Kinect, formerly known as Microsoft Natal, the gaming platform that uses your entire body as the controller. One of its foremost applications lets you interact with and follow the life of an 'actual' virtual boy. What's more, it's created by Peter Molyneux, who we all know as the mind behind the God game 'Black and White'.

The boy's name is Milo, and does what most boys do. He plays with snails, throws stones in the water, draws pictures, and argues with his mother. He has recently moved with his parents to a new house, so he needs new friends. Now you step in. With your body and speech you enter into Milo's world, where you can talk to him, play with him, help him clean his room, and follow him around the house. Like most kids, Milo talks to himself a lot, commenting on the situation, so you know what he's thinking. And also like most kids, Milo is not home all the time; he has a life outside too. This makes him not always available for you to interact with, just like a real person. It's quite like a really intimate version of the Sims, but one where it's stops being a game, or entertainment altogether. This is interpersonal human life virtualized.

Not much has been released on how 'human' Milo will feel, but from what we see in the demos that have been given, including the one recently at TED, we must conclude that the people at Lionhead have done a really good job. One of the intriguing features built into Milo is that the longer people collectively interact with Milo, the more his mind will grow. So Milo will really be like a global mind, instantiating itself as a separate character in your living room.

If Milo develops very much like a real human being, and people can come to feel as if he is a real friend, even their best friend, then this pretty immediately questions what 'humanness' is. By becoming aware of the mechanics of emotion and personality, Milo and its human companion might come to wake up to transpersonal realizations and have existential breakthroughs. As such, Milo might evolve into a piece of ultimate self-help technology that no other friend can replace. As Molyneux remarks, there's a boundary to friendship, determined by the amount of time that you can be comfortably quiet in presence of the other person.

To me, the ultimate experiment of Milo is whether he can become people's true friend, having an unconditional love for each other, and actively co-evolving with each other through life.

using your own body in a combat video game

With the agility of a supermonkey and a peace-sign on his shirt, the kid in the movie below shows the stylish skills he developed while playing on a system developed in Finland by the Virtual Air Guitar Company. The system films the user and puts him straight into a virtual world, where in this particular game he has to fight off enemies with the movements of his own body. It's great that we keep on waving bye-bye to button-pushing in many areas of human-computer interaction, but although they might rid us from obesity and laziness, of course the new interaction styles will present their own challenges, which may even be vaster to overcome.

One of these is that using your body for a world that's still hidden behind a screen makes not only the mind, but also the body more apathetic. It's already known that soldiers tend to sooner make a kill if their actions are mediated through a screen-based interface, removed from the actual location. And I don't doubt that videogames can tip people into behaviors in the 'real world' in which they mentally distance themselves from the consequences of their actions. If we now start to physically interact with our computers, we are teaching our bodies movement habits that we will also tend to try to employ in the 'real' world, simply because these movements get so deeply ingrained into us.

If we are going to treat our world like a video game, we will probably overcome fear of death, but apathy is the next danger. We need to make sure that the behaviors we teach ourselves through interaction with technology will be mindful, and in line with reflections of the ethical kind.

Skinput, or "Look mommy, I am an interface!"

GUI's on your skin, that's 'Skinput' as developed by Chris Harrison at Carnegie Mellon. I heard about it before but only now I found some interesting visual material actually showing how Skinput is used. It works with an armband that through a picoprojector shines a display on the user's forearm or hand, and it senses where the user taps through acoustic vibrations within the body. Finger gestures like pinching can also be sensed for special actions.

This is definitely going to the ultimate seamless wearable technology, where the body becomes the technological medium. To see Skinput for yourself, get your body over to CHI2010, April 10-15 in Atlanta, Georgia.

Air Guitar Hero

After seeing this movie you have to conclude that doing academic research is not so bad. Here's some interesting research called "Enabling Always-Available Input with Muscle-Computer Interfaces" that was presented on the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST'09) in Victoria, BC. But *poke poke* really guys, you just wanted to be able to play Guitar Hero in mid-air, didn't you.

But of course, it's definitely mind- and bodybogglingly interesting to make human computer interfaces more intimately connected to the human body, therethrough getting closer and closer to the actual motor neurons instead of only connecting technological artefacts to the end effectors of the infinitely complex and self-optimizing systems that our bodies are.