Here's what I got from the talk. I've always wondered why did Autodesk (which is into engineering design software, the famous product being AutoCAD) buy Alias? At the time (about 1 and half years ago), I didn't quite understand. After tonight's talk, now I understand why.
So, as I always do at talks, I whipped out my laptop and started making notes. I wanted to write this on the blog so I searched for an Internet connection. I got connected to One Zone but I couldn’t connect to the Internet so I’m writing this in Word. This is the talk by Gordon Kurtenbach as part of the TorCHI meeting for the month of March. Gordon is the mastermind behind marking menus, he has 21 patents, and won an Academy Award for Ryan. Autodesk bought Alias Wavefront over a year ago. Alias is well known for its Maya software which was used for making the computer generated characters for the Lord of the Rings. Beside movies, games are becoming very realistic as well as commercials.
Architecture is now doing rendering with 3D realism, to see what the thing they are building, before it gets built. The media tools are used to amplify the artist’s talents. The technologist should not turn into an artist and vice versa. The user interface needs to fit the skills of the user. So what is considered natural interface for the user? It really is relative to the person who is using it.
What is natural? What is intuitive? What do those terms mean? It means it is a knowing of what the user will do. Ben Schneiderman, Stu Card, and others were the ones that laid the background for graphical user interfaces. With a musician, practice is what you do to learn how to play an instrument. Gordon’s PhD thesis dealt with accelerating the practice of user interfaces from novice to expert.
Gordon’s work on marking menus deals with the user using a pen to move and mark, and there is a menu associated with the direction of the mark. Marking menus can perform faster than regular linear menus which we have in software.
Another example of another user interface is to use bimanual input. Gordon is showing a video of Bill Buxton showing tape drawing, which car manufacturer companies use to show a drawing of a car.
Learning from a traditional medium, the tape drawing can be replicated in the computer as shown in the picture below.
It is the mastery of the skill that makes an expert able to use an unnatural interface (to a regular person) become a natural interface.
Alias then took these research ideas and prototypes to the field, and created Alias SketchBook Pro for performing sketching on a Tablet PC. Alias created a tracking menu for zooming and panning using a “jar lid” where the widget of the tool moves along with the jar lid. The widget tool can have two or more tools simultaneously attached to the cursor. The whole idea is to put all the accessible tools for the user clustered and close to this jar lid or wheel.
There was this really cool screen where you can move the screen and navigate inside and around a virtual car. This eliminates having to wear glasses and do virtual reality. Gordon ended his talk in that context matters with user interfaces.
All in all, it was a great talk. There were demos afterwards. This is a great example of taking a PhD thesis, and then applying it to research in industry and making a career out of it. I'm sure I can definitely learn from this, when it comes for me to get a job after my PhD.
On Technorati: Alias, TorCHI, AutoDesk
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