On 01-Mar-06 Peter Onion wrote:
On Tue, 2006-02-28 at 23:25 +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
It's always worth looking at beta's of upcoming OS releases to see where they are heading...you never know there may be one or two good ideas that should be in Linux....But looking at these shots of Vista I am wondering if MS have sacked half their UI team (if they haven't they should do)
I think this explains a lot !
http://research.microsoft.com/vibe/pubs/stepUICHI06.pdf
Peter ;-)
Should appeal to organists.
Rather exciting, in fact -- In many ways the keyboard is more flexible than the mouse since it's two handed and multi-fingered, and you can play a lot of keys at the same time or in rapid succession, like playing a keyboard. (Remember WP-5 on DOS?). The mouse, however, is really a one-handed device with very limited multi-finger capability; the main gain lies (theoretically) in the possible choice of millions of pixels to point at, compared with the 100+ keys on a keyboard; though whether you really gain in functional choice depends on the design of the GUI. A lot of GUIs seem to give you about a dozen choices at a time.
With a pedalboard to play with one's feet at the same time, the keyboard could be multiplied by a large factor.
I think this "Step UI" should be extended to allow user control via what I have christened "Balancing User Mechanism", or BUM -- otherwise described as "steering by the seat of your pants". An array of pressure sensors installed in the user's chair would allow this to be implemented.
And while I'm at it -- why not? -- can I invite discussion on the possibilities of a Whole-Body UI? (I already have some ideas about this, but space and other considerations preclude going into detail).
Best wishes to all, Ted.
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