• The iPhone is apparently single-handedly propping up the Smartphone market, but Nokia's N97 may start raining on Apple's parade by reaching a pivotal convergence point between Netbooks and mobile phones (and Windows Mobile still has its fans).
• This article in Smart Device Central has a thoughtful analysis of the growing use of touch screens in mobile phones, pointing out that they are paving the way for a new crop of Natural User Interfaces (NUIs).
• The Mobile Millennium project at Berkeley is developing a system that allows mobile phone users to contribute data on traffic flow. Participants download some software that tracks their movements and in return, they receive personalized traffic information on their cell phones. Unlike existing traffic monitoring services that focus primarily on major highways, the hope is that this approach will collect traffic data on smaller side roads as well.
• The X Reality (Cross Reality) project at MIT merges real and virtual worlds (see discussion in this Forbes article). The lab has PDA-sized devices mounted on the walls with an iPhone-like touch screen, Second Life software, sensors, and wireless connections. Anyone in the building wearing an electronic badge can peer into the screens to see a Second Life landscape and communicate with virtual users.
• Oblong Industries takes another step closer to the gesture interface shown in Minority Report with the g-speak interface, which is described as Spatial Operating Environment.
• Some brief thoughts from IEEE's Computer.org about how Semantic Web interfaces should behave. The wrong way? Display a Big Fat Graph.

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• Microsoft is stepping up its attention on touch interfaces. In addition to keeping its researchers busy studying touch interface concepts(see see photos), it may be preparing to introduce a consumer version of its Surface table-top computing interface. Microsoft is opening up access to the Surface Software Development Kit, and conducting consumer surveys, which indicate that the target price for consumers might be $1,499. Commercial applications of large touch interfaces are catching on, showing up places like restaurants.
• The Semantic Web may get a jump-start with the launch of Twine, an organizer tool that can be used to register W3C-compliant metadata for user data. Twine uses artificial intelligence to parse the contents of Web pages and extract key concepts, and then uses these concepts to link users and information (see video).
• As part of the Glow 08 arts festival in Santa Monica, CA, an enormous mist projection system was set up on the beach. The system coupled a fog display, in which images are projected into droplets of water in the air, with a sound-detection system that responded to crowd participation. The result was a mirage-like appearance of colorful patterns projected into the sky, changing based on music and screams of people nearby (see video).
• Researchers at the University of Utah are working on novel approaches to visualize election polls, which might make it easier for news reporters and citizens to analyze election results, political opinion polls or other surveys. The system represents data in concentric rings, listing questions on the outside, and narrowing the question to certain demographic groups on the inside (see example).
• A secretive startup named Siri is planning to introduce a new paradigm for the consumer Internet experience that applies artifical intelligence in the interface. While the company has not yet disclosed details about its design, it is possible that the system will make inferences of users' intentions based on their activity, learning what they do over time, so that it can automatically take actions on their behalf. The company plans to release a beta version of its product in the first half of 2009.

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• David Greenfield asks whether browsers will become the preferred entrypoint for the 3D web, as shown by the recent flood of offerings for plugging 3D web site visualization into standard browsers, such as GoWeb3D, WebFlock from Electric Sheep Company (which appears to have broadened its ambitions beyond adding value to Second Life), Google's Lively, Altadyn's 3DXplorer, and ExitReality.
• Microsoft has been showing off a spherical version of its Surface multi-touch display.
• The Kitchen Budapest Medialab has developed a Zooming User Interface based on Flash called ZuiPrezi - try it out in this sandbox and tutorial and see this example presentation.
• Eagle Mode is an open source ZUI platform that lets users visit almost anything simply by zooming in. It has a professional file manager, file viewers for common file types, a chess game, a 3D mines game, a multi-function clock and some fractal fun, all integrated into a virtual "cosmos" space (see screenshots).
• This NY Times article (free registration required) highlights the growing use of IBM's Many Eyes web site that lets visitors submit data and visualize it using various methods. While the site was originally intended for processing numerical data, it is increasingly being used to analyze the contents of large text files (see visualizations of presidential campaign speeches from John McCain and Barack Obama).
• Skyrails is a tool that was originally developed for visualizing social network visualisation, but can be used to interact with any reasonably sized graph (see screenshots).

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• Slashdot reports on a command-line interface for Google called goosh.
• MIT Technology Review has an article on peer-to-peer virtual worlds, which are designed to respond more efficiently to sudden crowd surges than the centralized servers of popular sites like Second Life. The article highlights the VastPark toolset, but doesn't mention Croquet, a peer-based VR environment that has been around for a while.
• Microsoft considered scrapping its Surface multitouch interface as it struggled to find a business model for the technology, but it now expects to deliver a consumer version by 2011. As can be seen on the Surface demos being shown in some AT&T phone stores, Apple's iPhone is not the only device with a pinch interface.
• Speaking of the iPhone, its adoption may face an uphill battle in some regions such as the Middle East and Africa. Why? No flash for taking pictures in the dark!

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This New York Times article explores the possibility that users are ready to embrace interfaces that let them directly control objects in a 3D space on their screen, blending 3D representations of content with physics software to produce visually stimulating experiences. A number of consumer offerings are now appearing that are designed to exploit immersive 3D environments to make viewing large numbers of web pages, videos, and pictures more efficient. The article features PicLens, a FireFox plugin that transforms the browser into a full-screen, 3D experience for viewing images on the web. With PicLens, arrays of photos are brought to life via a cinematic presentation that extends beyond the confines of the traditional browser window, using an interactive "3D Wall" allowing users to drag, click, and zoom their way around a wall of pictures (see screenshot).

A company not mentioned in the article is SpaceTime, which has just officially launched its SpaceTime 1.0 3D web browser. SpaceTime turns internet searches, YouTube videos, eBay listings and other web content into 3D elements that move around the screen (see YouTube demo). Another company called 3B offers a browser that allows users to take any collection of web sites or photos, and place them into a personalized 3D space called a 3B room (see screenshots). The question remains whether these tools truly make browsing more efficient, or are just eye-candy that will produce only a short-lived fit of interest before users return to their more familiar 2D point-and-click habits.

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Zoom Quilt is a collaborative art project based on Flash that illustrates what a 3D Zooming User Interface (ZUI) might look and feel like. Zoom Quilt was assembled from different frames of content contributed by various participants. Version 2 of the project now includes 88 different scenes.

Separately, Microsoft announced that it will distribute the ZUI developed by Zumobi for its Windows Mobile operating system. Zumobi was formerly known as ZenZui, which was spun off from Microsoft to commercialize its ZUI technology.

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