Imagine the desktop environment modeled entirely in 3D. You have windows, buttons and icons represented by 3D geometry placed inside a virtual world. Every object is illuminated by a sun that swings slowly across your desktop. Objects cast shadows, reflect surrounding objects, and illuminate each other. This creates “noise”, but if you change it ever so slightly…

Imagine that sun moves across your desktop at the same rate as the sun outside your window would, casting different shadows and hues at different times of the day. Add some particle effects to simulate clouds, rain, wind and vehicle emissions. The result? A weather indicator that would blow Atmosphere away, pun intended. This is only one example of “ambient notifications”.

The inventors of the patent, “Noisy operating system user interface”; David Vronay, Lili Cheng, Baining Guo and Sean Kelly (from Microsoft) believes a little bit of noise is good. Apparently there is a psychological phenomenon called “just noticeable difference”, or JND. It describes the human perception of change subconsciously. The benefit of this psychological ’sense’ presents a method of communicating change without being consciously aware of it. But noise is a prerequisite.

For example,

People can perceive changes even without being consciously aware of changes below the JND. For instance, it is impossible not to notice a telephone ringing in one’s own quiet office. But if one works in a phone bank, where dozens or hundreds of phones are always ringing, it would be difficult or impossible to process every ring. However, a person working on the phone bank might have a general (ambient) sense of whether it was a busy day or a slow day even without being consciously aware of each individual ring.

Leading to the software implementation, realistically speaking, 3D desktops are still years away for the mass-market, but technically possible right now (ex. Sun’s Project Looking Glass). Don’t expect to see Solitaire in 3D anytime soon.

Aero Glass touches only the surface of a noisy user interface with translucency. Could Motion Desktop dive deeper into the idea? Potentially rendering desktops that reflect information you want to know in the back of your head, like the weather or even how hot AERO is making your GPU sweat. It’d sure be useful.

On the world stage, Australia lacks behind in everything besides global warming. We’re decades ahead of anyone in terms of unpredictable weather patterns, but if you talk about technology, we’re the laggard’s laggards. When I first heard of the eGames expo, I immediately thought this was Australia’s chance to rocket into the spotlight of world-first product announcements and showcases.

Today, I visited the eGames expo with high expectations and great hopes. This is what I saw.

I guess a lot of people had the same idea.

Continue reading →

eGames opens tomorrow. Anyone got any questions for the Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft people? I’ve been a bit out of the loop on console games so I don’t know what are the hot rumors at the moment. If you would like to put forward some questions in the comments, I’d note them down and harass some of those representatives for you with my shiny press badge.

The only question on my mind is about the Halo 3 public multiplayer beta. When is it? And how do people join? And when is Halo Wars going to be released? Not that I have an XBOX360 to begin with.

Got anything else? Send them in!

The Zune is big. The Zune is larger than the iPod. The Zune software fails to install. The Zune software is crap. Zune software crashes. The Zune DRM is crap. Microsoft screws PlaysForSure customers. Zune doesn’t work with Vista. Zune colors stinks. Kids hate the Zune. Zune isn’t hip. Zune isn’t a storage device. Zune doesn’t work with iTunes. Zune doesn’t support Macs. Zune’s Wifi sucks. Zune is expensive.

Of course, Microsoft has no intentions of pricing or selling the Zune in Australia anytime soon.

But that doesn’t matter does it? Because jumping on the Zune-bashing bandwagon is cool. I don’t even need to hold one to make a newsworthy judgment of it.

Ready Summit

A few fine picks from my gallery of pictures taken at Microsoft’s Ready Summit 06 in Melbourne today. I tried not to take too many pictures of slides since they are available online (publically) from the Ready Summit 06 Resources website. These photos come from the keynote, developers keynote and various user experience-oriented sessions.

Expression Blend

I honestly didn’t expect any secrets to come out at Ready Summit, but I guess I was wrong. When Mitch Denny talked about “Building Differentiated User Experiences”, he demoed this application to build an application interface using XAML and Windows Presentation Foundation. It was titled, “Microsoft Expression Blend, Beta 1”. Everyone knows about “Expression”, but no one’s ever heard of “Blend”.

We all know Microsoft Expression is a set of graphics-creation applications for uses of image composition, interface design and website design, with the names of “Graphics Designer”, “Interactive Designer” and “Web Designer” respectively. So what is “Blend”? It was clear from the functionality and tools (e.g. timeline editor), this was is Interactive Designer. Therefore, I speculate “Blend” is the official name crafted by the branding team to make the product ‘hip’. Although I think Interactive Designer makes a lot more sense, but when has common sense ever been marketable, right?

And no, the projection is not black and white (unlike Andrew Coates‘ presentation). The interface is white-on-black, light-on-dark, contrasted, inverted, or blackish. Whatever you want to call it, it’s definitely not bright. This seems to be a trend Microsoft is following with Vista-generation applications, websites and marketing.

I guess you should expect to hear more about Expression Blend, and the Beta 1 release soon!

Jenny Lam

By the way, there was also a nice video with Jenny Lam in it. Not much to see that is new or unfamiliar to anyone reading this blog, except Jenny Lam. “Wooord”.

View: Microsoft User Interface video

Photo credit: The Age / Associated Press