Natural user interface

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article's tone or style may not be appropriate for Wikipedia. Specific concerns may be found on the talk page. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for suggestions. (April 2009)

Natural user interface, or NUI, is the common parlance used by designers and developers of computer interfaces to refer to a user interface that is effectively invisible, or becomes invisible with successive learned interactions, to its users. The word natural is used because most computer interfaces use artificial control devices whose operation has to be learned. A NUI relies on a user being able to carry out relatively natural motions, movements or gestures that they quickly discover control the computer application or manipulate the on-screen content. The most descriptive identifier of a NUI is the lack of a physical keyboard and/or mouse.

Contents 1 Evolution 2 Early Examples of interfaces commonly referred to as NUI 3 Examples of interfaces commonly referred to as NUI 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

[edit] Evolution

In the 2008 conference presentation "Predicting the Past," August de los Reyes, a Principal User Experience Director of Surface Computing at Microsoft described the NUI as the next evolutionary phase following the shift from the command-line interface (CLI) to the graphical user interface (GUI).^[1]

In the CLI, users had to learn an artificial means of input, the keyboard, and a series of codified inputs, that had a limited range of responses, where the syntax of those commands was strict and inflexible.

Then, when the mouse enabled the GUI, users could more easily learn the mouse movements and actions, and were able to explore the interface much more. The GUI relied on metaphors for interacting with on-screen content or objects. The 'desktop' and 'drag' for example, being metaphors for a visual interface that ultimately was translated back into the strict codified language of the computer.

The natural user interface removes the metaphors, and many of the artificially learned devices, to allow users to more directly manipulate content using more natural movements, motions and gestures. Because the NUI is so fast to learn, the adjective 'intuitive' is applied by many to describe how users interact with it.

[edit] Early Examples of interfaces commonly referred to as NUI

Multi-Touch

When Bill Buxton was asked about the iPhone's interface, he responded "Multi-touch technologies have a long history. To put it in perspective, the original work undertaken by my team was done in 1984, the same year that the first Macintosh computer was released, and we were not the first."^[2]

[edit] Examples of interfaces commonly referred to as NUI

Jeff Han

One example is the work done by Jefferson Han on multi-touch interfaces. In a demonstration at TED in 2006, he showed a variety of means of interacting with on-screen content using both direct manipulations and gestures. For example, to shape an on-screen glutinous mass, Jeff literally 'pinches' and prods and pokes it with his fingers. In a GUI interface for a design application for example, a user would use the metaphor of 'tools' to do this, for example, selecting a prod tool, or selecting two parts of the mass that they then wanted to apply a 'pinch' action to. Han showed that user interaction could be much more intuitive by doing away with the interaction devices that we are used to and replacing them with a screen that was capable of detecting a much wider range of human actions and gestures.

Microsoft Surface

Microsoft Surface takes similar ideas on how users interact with content, but adds in the ability for the device to optically recognise objects placed on top of it. In this way, users can trigger actions on the computer through the same gestures and motions as Jeff Han's touchscreen allowed, but also objects become a part of the control mechanisms. So for example, when you place a wine glass on the table, the computer recognises it as such and displays content associated with that wine glass. Placing a wine glass on a table is a natural thing for a person to do, hence it fits as part of a natural user interface.

Xbox Project Natal

Xbox Project Natal is the code name of a project from Xbox that will be using spatial gestures for interaction instead of a game controller. According to Microsoft's page, Project Natal is designed for a "a revolutionary new way to play: no controller required."^[3]

NeuroSky

NeuroSky is a company that produces a product that resembles a pair of headphones and software that claims to be able to "to sense and interpret your brainwaves, and is able to determine your level of attention and meditation."^[4] To date there is a single game that is controlled by brainwaves called NeuroBoy.^[5] In NeuroBoy the user can push items by meditating and move objects by focusing on them.^[5]

[edit] See also

• Kinetic user interface

[edit] References

This article includes a list of references or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (April 2009)

• http://blogs.msdn.com/surface/archive/2009/02/25/what-is-nui.aspx

[edit] External links

Examples and Further Reading

• http://www.vimeo.com/channels/nui - Vimeo's NUI Channel showcasing NUI Interfaces
• http://www.billbuxton.com/ - Principal Researcher at Microsoft

Academic research

• NiCE (Natural User Interfaces for Collaborative Environments) - NUI project at the Media Interaction Lab of the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences
• Natural user interaction in virtual/augmented reality - NUI research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of Computer Science