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Handhelds Hardware

New Interface for Handheld Computers 50

Posted by CmdrTaco from the future-gui dept.
Kevin Remhof writes "Researchers at SunLabs have come up with a new theoretical interface for handheld computers. As stated in the abstract: "The key idea of the proposed model is that the display can be compressed and expanded by moving objects radially farther away or closer to an event horizon in the middle of the screen." It's tailor-made for small screens. "
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New Interface for Handheld Computers More

New Interface for Handheld Computers

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  • Gimme a unixish CLI with a MUD/Zorklike shell, and a GUI in a Quake3/Thieflike environment... Drool.
  • Imagine that you're inside a big cylinder, infinite in length, and looking towards the exit (infinitely far away).

    Your data is laid out on the inside of the cylinder. You can only see what's in front of you, and not too far away (what's closer than the horizon).

    You can move forward, making objects that were further away appear coming out of the horizon). You can move backwards, making objects that were just behind you appear at the edge of you field of view (the edge of the screen).

    So I'd call this a cylindrical horizon.

    -- Efgé
  • Sounds suspicously like parabolic geometry, maybe?

    Everything old is new again....

  • I remember a "Project X" or something like that
    that Apple played around a bit back in 1996 or so. It built a fisheye view of your file system where you could zoom into places with mouse (why not pen) and click on files.

    Gimme 3D or gimme death! I want to save my loads of miscellanea on the first level of Doom 1.666, run for that DBI room through the projects hallway, and return to the starting door to access / fs. All the while blasting others accessing same NFS branches of course :)

    BTW1, document writer's name is Finnish.

    BTW2, ghostview couldn't open the .ps? Download .pdf in first place if you have restricted bandwidth.

  • This is useful for small screens. The Windows taskbar can quickly fill a lot of space on a small screen. Basically, this solves that problem because the icons go away, either outside of your screenspace or in the "black hole". You can find them again by quickly expanding or shrinking until the icons you want come back into view. It is a tad confusing right now, but it's a good beginning for solving a tough problem, IMHO.

  • Didn't MS make use of this concept in some kind of internet mapping software? (Sorry, I forgot its name).
  • Hotsauce, nee Project X, was an Apple project. GoLive CyberStudio v2 was an application which could export site indexes as .mcf's- you could have a running X-map of your site. Very, very, very cool stuff. Alas, it was Steved.

  • Re:It's Similar to Fisheye Views (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Microsoft does NOT reinvented antialiasing - do not depict them as complete idiots. They reinvenetd (or reused) subpixel rendering, which is less evident technique. Good reference with demo is at:
    http://grc.com/cleartype.htm
    I am not affiliated to grc.com in any way, except I like their attitude to writing software (though, do not follow it ;-).
  • It could be enhanced. For example, it would be really cool to place a sink within a sink! That would vastly increase scalability and make it hierarchical more like a traditional file system.

    For example, you expand the first sink until you see your personal document folder. You select that sink. From there you expand it until you see a folder for notes from your brother and you select it, and so on.

    What's really cool about this is that it adds a sort of three dimensional method of accessing files rather than the simple tree and file list.

    -Aaron
  • See InXight's Hyperbolic Tree at http://www.hyperbolictree.com/Inxight/Demos/HT_Liv e_Demos/HT_Live_Demos_Page.html for a demo of this software and concept of data representation.

    --
  • MS purchased this from InXight if I am not mistaken.....http://www.hyperbolictree.com/Inxight /Demos/HT_Live_Demos/HT_Live_Demos_Page. html
  • Or even better, swappable event horizons, like switching between desktops...cool.


    Read the article in full, you can change "sinks" in the file pull-down

  • It also makes mention of the source being a tiny 34K. That's pretty neat code for a desktop zooming function.

    And BTW, the parent posts are all excellent replys to the previous 10 (with some exceptions)who obviously only read the blerb.

  • http://www.hyperbolictree.com/Inxight/Demos/HT_Liv e_Demos/HT_Live_Demos_Page.html
  • Not a bad idea. Yet another variation on things found most recently in the likes of MS ChromeEffects, but also seen in Apple's RDF browser, Perspecta's thingamawhatsises, the Brain, and, eek, Gopherspace 3D, that wonderful last triumph of, y'know, gopher, among many others. Nice to see some of these ideas moving off the VGA monitor.
  • I just downloaded The Brain -- It rocks!

    It craps on any org chart or heirachial thing I've come accross
  • How 'bout having a 3D windowmanager, such that you can put your "event horizon" wherever you feel like it, and leave the virtual desktops as they are? This way, the multiple desktops will provide your abstract demarcations, and you will have complete control over all three dimensions. Obviously, we now have fine-grain control in 2D, and stacking of windows in 3D. People who get confused by multiple desktops and the such can choose to do without them and, in this case, the convergent third dimension. I may be smoking crack; or this might herald the embryonic stages of a true 3D (virtually real [?!]) graphical user space.
  • I messed up the link to Thought Stream. It's at http://www4.ncsu.edu/~bgdarnel/though tstream/ [ncsu.edu]

  • Duh! (Score:2)

    by Enry ( 630 )
    This is one of those "why didn't I think of it?" kinds of ideas.

    In short, think of you standing in an open field. There are 5 trees at varying distances from you. As you move back, the trees will disappear into the horizon, and as you get closer, the trees get closer until you pass them, in which case they're behind you and out of view.

    Now replace the field with the Palm screen, the trees with file icons, and the horizon with the event horizon.

    Anyone find a URL for the software? I'd like to try it out.
  • There has been similar UI work before at Xerox PARC and notably the Fisheye View work by Marc H. Brown at Compaq's (formerly Digital's) Systems Research Center.

    http://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/DEC/SRC/research-r eports/abstracts/src-rr-084.html

    A good path towards Dick Tracy watches.


  • I think they mean "horizon" rather than "event horizon" - once something moves over an event horizon you can't get it back again... (this has particular significance for me, a Windows user who's just started his move away from the dark side and is struggling to get out of the FUD gravity field...)

    But anyway, I think this UI model solves several problems with onscreen real estate, especially if it'll work with the eyepiece screens being developed at MIT and elsewhere. A big problem with "spacial" UIs is that of the user getting "lost in space" - and this is reduced if there's something solid to use as a reference point, like the horizon bar. Good luck to them.
  • Looking at the paper, this looks like the start of a good idea. In it's current form, it seems a tad confusing, but I think there are some definate possibilities here. I envision something like a "snap" feature on this, where you can instantly restore positions instead of manually expanding them back. Or even better, swappable event horizons, like switching between desktops...cool.

  • It's not a doughnut, think more like a trumpet facing you. Stuff is on the inside wall of big (infinite) trumpet that you can zoom into or out of..

    I kinda like the inverse better, the fishey view. In that model you're on the surface of a hemisphere (or some such thing which recedes away from you as you move outward), and you can push stuff outside to the edges where it gets compressed, but stuff in the middle is mostly undistorted. It's a better model for high res displays like a desktop, where you'd like to see things in the center in full nice undistorted quality, but be able to push things out to the edges and have them be visible but unimportant.

  • Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:

    "radially expanding"? Could they have made this description more confusing?

    From the pictures (I'm not even going to try to read the text) this looks pretty simple and neat. Here's a better description:

    Imagine a very fat doughnut. So fat that the top surface is nearly flat and inner circle is really just a small disk. There is a virtual screen on the surface of this doughnut. You view the doughnut so that the inner disk is in the center of the screen. You bring hidden areas into view by rotating the doughnuts surface in towards the disk.

    What seems to make this better than regular virtual desktops is that all areas are more easily accessible. You don't need a desktop manager because you just "scroll the doughnut" until the item you want is in view.

    The problem, as I see it, is that the intended small devices have low resolutions--that's the very problem they are trying to solve. Low resolutions don't work very well with non-90 degree angles.
    --
    "Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
  • You still need to search linearly through your entire desktop. You could just throw icons on a desktop that can scroll infintely up and down and acheive exactly the same use.

    It does not seem very useful to me.
  • I agree - Deja Vu!

    When I saw this I thought - didn't I see Xerox demo that on TV, a coupla years ago??!?!?!
    IIRC they were dead chuffed with it at the time ... and maybe copyrighted it?

    Heads up Sunlabs - you may have done an MS "we just invented anti-aliasing" ;-)

  • That Hyberbolic Tree demo applet thingie kinda looked like this. Things near your current position in the tree were big, and far away things were small.

  • Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:

    From the comments of others (who apparently read the paper *ahem*) it sounds like my description is way off base.

    On the other hand, I think I might like my idea better...
    --
    "Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
  • After all what we are really talking about is hanging all our icons in a corridor, and walking backwards or forwards along that corridor. We just add one dimension of extra space to the basic desktop. Probably more convenient than having a line of virtual desktops, but not much.

    'Event Horizon' suggests a non-euclidean space, which is far more interesting. The problem remains how to ensure thing which you need together are nearby in space. The hyperbolic tree still seems better, as others have pointed out.
  • Nay, event horizon is correct. In cosmology the event horizon of a black hole isn't the 'collection of points of no return'. Its 'the collection of points in which event A is continuous' event A could be defined in this case as 'the curvature of spacetime converges instead of diverging'. Why its called an event horizon is because the observer gets to define the events however he feels. On the other hand, horizon stands for 'the boundary of' and is objective, unlike event horizon which is subjective.

    I like this design, but I hope it doesn't cause the VR-drunkenness syndrome experienced when people get off of working with VR units. Obviously this is much different, but it might cause a person to be woozy afterwards, especially if they adapted it to large screens instead of handhelds.
  • Posted by Dahakbert:

    Didn't find a URL, but I'd like one... if anyone finds one, please post it.
  • ...representation of web data, which is patented if I recall. There was a /. article on it a while back.

    ---
  • Hehe, yeah, my eyebrows made a hole in my roof (darn plaster) when i saw "event horizon"... Imagine that, you're own little handheld black hole :) Talk about a battery drainer.

    Anyways, seems like an interesting idea.

  • As the paper said, there have already been a lot of other projects that use zooming. The best known example is probably Pad++ [ucsd.edu] (Warning, site features frames and a resource-sucking applet).
    The ideas of Pad++ are interresting (for example filters that you can move in front of data to transform its display) and worth a look, but I am not sure whether I would really like to work with something like that. On the other hand, maybe today's input devices just arnt ready for this.. zooming with a mouse is no fun...

  • Re:Read the PDF for crying out loud (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I agree with the above. It is not Yet Another GUI as I thought when I began to read. If you read the PDF you find:
    The Horizon involved is not a line it is a circle like a black hole. The Donut analogy was good but I think of it as push-pinning your papers to a sheet spread out on the floor and then the sheet is pulled into a hole in the center and pulled out again.
    The reason it beats scrolling is that you get two dimensions (North South, East West) with one button.
    The reason it beats Fish Eyes and Hyperbolics is constant scale of object hence less graphically/processor/resource intensive.

    Finally, it uses 45 degree and 90 degree simulation of radial movement to cut out floating point operations in calculating the movements of the objects.

  • What exactly is this useful for? Arranging Icons? I have to say that I feel the windows taskbar is far superior to this idea. I am not a fan of microsoft by any means, either.

    Seems like people get really excited about metaphors in computing whether they are useful or not.

    --bricktoad
  • My XWindows environment uses multiple desktops, allows me to zoom in and pan accross a desktop and place icons on the desktop. I wonder if they would entertain the idea of having multiple horizons and each horizon simulates one of my desktops. You could then choose a new horizon in the same manner as I chose a new desktop.

    Ideas?
    -----------
    Resume [iren.net]
  • The only thing missing is the "gravity" of the event horizon, which would pull files in if they got too close.

    I also detect a strong "Omega Race" influence in the clustering of the files as they grow closer to the event horizon.

    May I suggest, instead, a "Q*Bert" file system where files can be "lured off" the pyramid to their inevitable deletion, and viruses are represented by small purple icons?

  • Actually, 'sub-sinks' can be placed within other 'sinks', something like subdirectories. Only one sink is operational at a given time, you click on a sub-sink of your current sink to change to that sink. Alternatively, you can click on your current sink (always in the middle of the display) to move up one sink level.

    This UI looks like it could eventually be quite robust. The speed at which the movement takes place is probably the greatest inhibiting factor to the user. On a small-display device, this is a godsend, but on a normal desktop PC it would have to be considerably expanded. Multiple sinks open at a time and so on.

    I'm looking forward to trying this UI out on my system, eventually.
  • thats where I had seen this before!

    that and the metacontent demo that came out a few years ago... hotsauce I think it was called..

    still a neat idea
  • I scanned the article and it looks like SunLabs limited it's UI to something like a navigator zooming in and out of a static 2D map.

    There are more metaphors that take the SunLabs concept further. The neuron/brain model is common to a lot of these UI programs.

    • Thought Stream is a Palm program that allows you to store information and organize it by associations or links between ideas.
    • Thinkmap [thinkmap.com] has generated a really neat Java applet with www.bacardi.com [bacardi.com] (must be 21 to enter ;) to create an interactive web site that should leave a lasting impression even on heavy drinkers.
    • Natrificial has a software product called "The brain" [thebrain.com] that was so awesome, it was the first shareware product I ever purchased. The metaphor it uses for finding information is like that of SunLabs except it is better.
      I could create a "brain" whose central point is "college", around that point is college related stuff like: Chicago, beer, frat, and Kim. I tie the thought of Minneapolis to Kim since that's Kims home. Rob is also from Minneapolis but now he's in Chicago. Rob gets generated as having links to the existing Minneapolis and Chicago thoughts.
      Now when I road trip to Chicago next, I can navigate to that thought and see links to Rob (and thoughts tied to Rob in the distance), college (and things associated with college in the distance). Ain't that slick.
      And the beauty of this is that it's a slick UI for Windows (flames ignored) and the files can be imported into Thought Stream.
    • MindManager [mindman.com] is another Win-doze client with some neat functionality. It uses the powerful concept of Mindmapping techniques to capture ideas and designs plus it has some good web export functionality.
    • Visual Mind [visual-mind.com] is like MindManager above, only I think it's not as powerful.
    Finally I have to give special recognition to Lifestreams [mirrorworlds.com]. Take a look at their MacroMedia presentation to see how they use chronology and a streaming metaphor to organize info. It is a simple and insightful solution that reflects the way most people work.

    Now if there was a product that merged the Lifestreams metaphor and "the brain" metaphor and included an HTML import/export function; I really doubt Mr. John Doe office worker would ever want to see a hierarchical or static 2D view of his files again.

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