UI
Mobile eCommerce Developments: Magento iPhone Theme
I’m excited about some promising first steps in the developing mobile eCommerce field, mCommerce. This video shows an early release of an iPhone Optimized Theme for eCommerce sites built with Magento — an open-source eCommerce platform. Because Magento is open-source, I expect to see many improvements in this interface that will ultimately make it as smooth and slick as buying from the iTunes Music Store or the App Store. (Note: The “Tony” in the video is not me, I’m a lot shorter.)
YouTube – Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the WiiRemote
YouTube – Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the WiiRemote
Using the infrared camera in the Wii remote and a head mounted sensor bar (two IR LEDs), you can accurately track the location of your head and render view dependent images on the screen. This effectively transforms your display into a portal to a virtual environment. The display properly reacts to head and body movement as if it were a real window creating a realistic illusion of depth and space. By Johnny Chung Lee, Carnegie Mellon University. For more information and software visit http://johnnylee.net
searchme: Visual search engine enters private beta
Visual search, with an iTunes-like visual scrolling (Cover Flow), seems like a the logical next step in the user-interface of search. searchme.com shows off an excellent demo of their visual approach.
Is this the next killer app? Should Google be concerned? It’s too early to tell how this will work in real life settings. Like the, thumbnail-focused www.pixsy.com, searchme believes that the future of search is visual.
The history of visual approaches to search, including 3D flythroughs and other graphical models, has been littered with failure. VRML comes to mind, in the 1990s this was going to be “next-gen” the 3D web. In early-2008, with broadband and ubiquitous dual-core cpu power, we still have not seen a visual approach to user-interface gain much traction in the marketplace. (The desktop metaphor–invented at Parc in the early ’80s, popularized by Apple, and copied by Microsoft–has been the last major epoch in user-interface development. We really haven’t moved much past overlapping windows in the past 28 years.)
Enabled by Adobe’s® Flex 3® software Searchme emphasizes that their technology is more than a slick UI.
“The Searchme visual search engine, which leverages the power and ubiquity of Adobe Flash™ software and Adobe Flex, is an innovative rich Internet application that could help fundamentally change the Internet search experience,” said Chris Rogers, West Region Leader, Adobe Consulting at Adobe. “It’s more than a slick UI; it’s an engaging search experience that emphasizes relevance and usability to help users more easily find what they’re looking for on the Web.” [press release]
I believe that people think primarily in verbal concepts, our brain has uniquely evolved to the complex task of reading in ways that cognitive neuroscientists like Dr. Maryanne Wolf are just now discovering. While, plain text is not as sexy as animated flipping thumbnails, I believe that relevance and simplicity are still king.
