(Notes from “Flash in the Can” http://www.fitc.ca conference)
Bumptop: Pushing the desktop metaphor, by Anand Agarawali
-computers are still in the “cave painting” era of user interfaces
-making it pretty doesn’t make it different or better
-bumptop — new paradigm — gesture based
-mimics the physical paradigm of “stuff on your desk”
-mimics physics without being bound by physics
-rigid body simulation
-the laws of thermodynamics do not apply
– “works for applications at all levels of the interface hierarchy” vis. return a google search as a group of icons of screenshots of the result pages
-user-tested: intuitive, takes advantage of spatial memory.
-feels more realistic than the current “desktop” metaphor
-TONS of buzz — video up on youtube, Dugg twice.
also showed us this thing; kind of a virtual overlay of the real world:
http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~ravin/ — Presentation #60, “Interacting with dynamically defined information spaces using a handheld projector and a pen.” Some of the other stuff on this page looks pretty cool, too