INTERFACES FEATURE
what this means is that manufacturers will be focused on creating devices that “are more user- friendly,” says Desbarats, as today’s smartphones aren’t as user-friendly as some might think. “Smartphones have been hijacked by the iPhone movement,” he says. “They’ve created this nice, beautiful device. But at the end of the day, if you really think about it, they’re not actually very easy devices to use on the go,” he says. For someone wanting to browse through their list of contacts, there are arguably more user-friendly methods than scrolling through an alphabetical list using your finger. TheAlloy works with a host of handset manufacturers and creates concept phones for them, ideas from which will be used in handsets that will commercially available later down the line. While the agency cannot divulge details of the ideas it works on with manufacturers, it also creates its own concept phones to demonstrate fresh and innovative design ideas. One of the concept phones that it has created has an interface that allows users to simply squeeze and tilt the handset in order to scroll through content, which the company claims is easier than using touchscreens while on the go. “All of these kinds of things just mean that
you can navigate in a shorter time and with less dexterity focused on the screen,” he says. “You need to be able to do stuff while you’re moving—that’s what’s missing in mobile phone interfaces generally. Everyone’s going app crazy but there’s a lot of stuff that can just be done on the go, such as setting access permissions. These things can be done much more naturally while you’re doing other things and we’ll see more of that.” But in order to incorporate this “squeeze
and tilt” functionality into phones, Desbarats says that manufacturers must move away from the rigid, solid structure of today’s devices. Indeed, flexible handsets enabled by nanotechnology are now being touted as the future of the mobile device by some vendors. It may sound implausible, but Samsung has confirmed that it will be launching a smart- phone with a flexible screen in 2012. The firm has been showcasing its flexible Super-AMOLED displays since 2010 and company spokesman Robert Yi confirmed in an earnings call in Octo- ber that products featuring the technology will be on sale in the first quarter of 2012. Market leader Nokia is also working on flexible handsets and Tapani Jokinen, head of design technology insights at the Finnish vendor, says it will be introducing similar twist and squeeze functionalities in its future phones.
Manufacturers are fast approaching the time when they will have to entice users with new designs, and they may need to move away from the now common 3.5-4in, touchscreen device, popularised by the first iPhone.
“The new properties that nanotechnology bring to us are really beginning to impact our designs, so we are trying to figure out how we could use this to bring meaningful experi- ences that really matter to users,” he explains. Taking the concept a stage further, Nokia hopes to challenge the traditional design of the mobile phone, with a project called Iho. Iho is the Finnish word for ‘skin’ and the project aims to create a skin-like wearable phone. “This is an electronic skin that we could use to create a flexible, transformable phone that you can attach to your skin meaning that it will always be there with you 24×7,” Jokinen explains. The phone would be wrapped around the user’s arm. Nokia’s experimentation has found that, using nanotechnology, the components in a phone do not have to be in specified places and can instead be moved around. The technology can also be used to create materials that are not just flexible, but also stretchable. But it’s not just the introduction of more flexible handsets that will challenge what has now become the “traditional” design of the smartphone. Korean firm Pantech has said that it will introduce a portfolio of Android handsets equipped with ‘touchless’ hand gesture recognition technology. The first device to feature the innovation, the
Vega, was launched in South Korea in November 2011. According to Pantech it enables users to answer incoming calls, activate the MP3 player, play games, and perform other tasks using simple hand gestures, recognised by the phone without the user having to touch the screen. Microsoft, meanwhile, is looking to extend the capabilities of touchscreen technology, with the OmniTouch project one of its most notable programmes. OmniTouch is the name being given to a technology that turns any surface in the user’s environment into a touch
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Gus Desbarats
interface. It is a wearable system that enables graphical, interactive, multi-touch input onto a range of everyday surfaces. “We wanted to capitalise on the tremen- dous surface area the real world provides,” explains Hrvoje Benko, of Microsoft’s natural interaction research group. “The surface area of one hand alone exceeds that of typical smart phones. Tables are an order of mag- nitude larger than a tablet computer. If we could appropriate these ad hoc surfaces in an on-demand way, we could deliver all of the benefits of mobility while expanding the user’s interactive capability.” The prototype OmniTouch device is built to
be wearable, and combines a laser-based pico- projector with a depth-sensing camera. “This custom camera works on a similar principle to Kinect [the Microsoft xBox motion-based gaming interface], but it is modified to work at short range,” explains Benko. Another technology that could revolutionise services brought to mobiles, but is today just in its infancy, is augmented reality. AR is set to become much more pervasive as researchers are experimenting with new use cases for the technology. But Gus Desbarats suggests that there might be a barrier to uptake in the form of user inertia. Consumers might simply find the idea of a virtual overlay on the real world too “weird”. Because of that, he says, AR is: “more likely to be used for professional services applica- tions, in the short term; for emergency services for example. It could allow you to be able to look a building and see who’s there, or look at a person and detect their body temperature,” he says. “So many devices and monitors are going to be connected, we’re just going to be swamped with information.” n
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