Lingfan Jiang – Looking Outwards 08

This week, I am especially interested in a project in INSTINT 2014 presented by Kate Hollenbach.  The company that the speaker is in is called Oblong. The intention of the software they are designing is to break out from a single screen and use human gestures to create more opportunities.

For decades, our normal interface with computers has been restricted to the possibilities offered by a single screen attached to a keyboard, a mouse, and limited touchscreen function. Although the machines have gotten much smarter, the human-machine interface still remains confined to interactions between one person and one machine. Therefore, in order to make the human-machine interfaces more advanced, Oblong created a 6-degree-of-freedom device that enables pointing at any screen in a Mezzanine room.

To me, I think this is definitely a direction we should aim for. Some people might think this needs a long time to develop and may only exist in fictional movies. However, to give a more common example, I think Apple is also trying very hard in this direction.  The earlier product iPhone X has already started to use gestures to achieve a more intuitive user interface. Therefore, I really admire the spirit of digging into this direction. Overall, I like the idea of encouraging a group of people working together and how their product could help them work more effectively. A lot of the times, conveying new ideas to other people is always the hardest.

For the strategies they present, they used their products step by step which shows one person working at first and then it shows how multiple people can also work together which helps her audience to understand the range of conditions their products are able to accomplish. I think I can definitely learn from it.