Sometimes its incredibly precise but most of the time it makes hilarious mistakes: “Cocktail recipes” become “Cocaine recipes”, “Snow Patrol” becomes “low cut throat” …

This experience strongly reminds me of experimenting with the handwriting recognition on the first Apple Newton 15 years ago.

All in all definitely room for improvement, but if one day the quality is right (like the textbased one), it will be a huge helper application …

Presentation for Internet World 2008 by Jan Groenefeld, Dieter Wallach and myself.

Besides finding this somewhat ironic since the whole stadium was swamped with advertisement for beer, I also was fascinated from a cultural standpoint …

… how easily some people sitting in my block actually called that number.

… that the behavior of the particular girl (eventually thrown out of the stadium by security) would have accounted to the socially accepted standard in a German soccer audience.

This experience reflects into the design of web communities: It’s a very sensitive part how the addressed culture judges behavior and thus which tools have to be offered for sanctioning it.

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.” [...]

It’s also become my motto, when people ask me what we’re doing— from now on, that’s what I’m going to tell them: We’re looking for the mouse. [via]

Definately a must see if they are in your area! As an appetizer, here is “Popplagið” the traditional encore of Sigur Rós shows (recorded in Reykjavik).

The first talk (left) by Sabrina Boler exemplifies an apparent core characteristic of NUIs: An utmost representation of real life (physics) preferably without any GUI element.

This got me pondering:

- How coherent can such a NUI user experience be when besides interaction with classic tangible artefacts (like the strained photo shoebox demo) also more complex applications from the GUI world have to be available?

- How fast does the balance between pure “naturalness” and efficiency flip in relation to the time prospective users worked with GUI systems?

- Is it really necessary to avoid “GUI baggage” at any cost? The last point raised in the video is a good example: A scrollbar is not just an instrument for navigation, but also a well-known indication if and how much content is available (and out of sight).

The second talk (right) by Dennis Wixon illuminates the design process of Microsoft Surface from the user research perspective. He also offers a short interesting digression into game design, a field where Microsoft is well known for its innovation. The mentioned MDA method (Mechanics - Dynamics - Aesthetics) method sounds interesting.