Microsoft’s 3D motion capture system for the Xbox 360, called Project Natal, continues to amaze and scare me with the potential it has to make your living room activities more interactive, and more public. Take for example, the post “In The Xbox Future, Your TV Will Know If You Are Yelling, Booing” over at Kotaku, wherein they highlight an angry sports fan interacting with a sporting event:

Imagine a sporting event — Natal could know which team you’re for because it sees your jersey, or knows you thought a bad call was made when you yell ‘boo.’ It learns about you and gets smarter to create a more tailored entertainment experience.

The sporting events/their broadcasters could theoretically partner with Microsoft and collect this sort of  information live, and display it during breaks in the event. For example, it could show the precent of Natal viewers who also thought that call was bad, or how many Natal viewers are cheering for the same team as you, and how many are cheering for the opposite team.

This kind of new interaction amazes me, but also scares me. I find it really eerie how close this situation is to a 1984-esque world, in which your TV watches you just as much as you watch it. Regardless, the technology is very exciting, and applications like this one will continue to catch my interest.

Let me know your thoughts on this kind of living room interaction in the comments!

Earlier today was IxDA Waterloo’s monthly meeting, and this month we did a UX Show and Tell. Apparently this is something that’s pretty popular at other local IxDA meetings, where the attendees share tidbits on projects they’ve worked on, things they’re working on now, etc. Jon and I decided we should share something and decided on giving our fellow UXers a feature highlight or Project MORIS.

Project MORIS was the final project to a directed study on User Interface Design that Tyler Burton, Jon Fritz and I completed in the Fall of 2009 at Wilfrid Laurier University under the supervision of Dr. Angele Hamel.  We decided to analyze the current registration system used at WLU called LORIS. After our analysis, we created a prototype of a new interface for LORIS using Visual Studio with Windows Forms and C#.

For the presentation we spent a few minutes whipping up a slideshow that gives a quick overview of what features of LORIS that Project MORIS was designed to fix. We intended to show a live demo of the application, however we ran out of time (presentations were limited to 6 minutes) so I decided to post both the slideshow and the application on the web. This way anyone who wants can check out the application or see a quick highlight of what we aimed to fix.

You can read a bit more about it on my About page, or just download the files here:

Presentation: Redesigning LORIS [.ppt]

Presentation: Redesigning LORIS [.pdf]

Application: Project MORIS [Requires the .NET Framework 3.0]

Leave your thoughts or questions in the comments and I’ll get back to you!

Apparently GM has been busy, working on early versions of a system that will turn windshields into heads-up displays. I think it was about two years ago when I first saw commercials for cars that projected your speed onto the windshield. Immediately my imagination went crazy – I thought it was the beginning of those really cool heads-up displays that you see on vehicles in science fiction.

I started thinking of what else you could do with that sort of technology. The first thing that came to mind was to move information from the dashboard to the windshield: your speed, gas tank’s gauge and whatever else you might fancy.

Now of course, there are dangers to having things displayed on the windshield. The big concern is that they may get in the way of seeing what’s on the road. Having them more prominently displayed might also cause drivers to look at them more often, causing a distraction. Both of those problems can be resolved by having some sort button on the steering wheel that toggles the display.

GM’s examples are even cooler than my initial ideas though: they have the system highlight the edge of the road in foggy conditions and pick out signs along the way and bring them to your attention with an outline. It seems that the system only highlights one thing at a time right now, but it’s not much of a stretch to imagine they’ll be able to do something like full road highlighting to make driving at night easier.

GM's HUD showing the edge of the road in fog

GM's HUD pointing out the speed limit sign

What excites me the most about this technology is the possibility for a GPS system where the instructions and path are drawn onto the windshield. This might actually make using a GPS safer, as you won’t have to look away from the road to check your path – it would be drawn onto the road! I made a really crude mock up of what the overlay could look like using a picture of the King St. and Weber St. intersection in Waterloo from Google Maps with Street View.

Windshield GPS Overlay
(Click to view higher resolution)

I really hope that GM can expand on this technology and make it affordable. I’d really love to see the applications of this make it to consumers.

Source: GM Makes Your Entire Windshield a Head-Up Display @ Wired.com