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...or so says Barry Schwartz in a TED talk about the Paradox of Choice. Not too much choice or it simply defeats the purpose, too little and it seems we are lacking freedoms. So how do we get it just right? By "right" I don't mean from a marketing perspective that is obvious from Schwartz's talk, but I mean from a human perspective -- making choices for ourselves, how to lead our lives, how to be happy as human beings.

Well, not exactly "mind control". It's not about controlling minds, but minds controlling an interface just by thinking about (or in some cases, minor facial muscle movement).

Built by emotiv, the technology has a lot of potential (mind reading by a lot of machine learning) but I think they have to rethink what they want to do with it beyond novelty and specialty and think of the big picture in terms of HCI.

Hot, hot demo of gspeak platform that post-shadows the interface shown in the movie, Minority Report. Built by Oblong industries, this collaborative interface combines multi-screen displays with spatial hand tracking movements through special gloves. More about it here.

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

Perhaps I should create a new blog section called 'Rambling' since this post does not really qualify as a 'finding' per se, though it is based on sources I've read recently.

The last several weeks have been a shock to anyone interested in the soundness of the U.S. financial system -- that 'anyone' is, directly or indirectly, knowingly or by extension, almost everyone in the world. For Americans and non-Americans alike that interest in the U.S. economy comes from a dependence that becomes most clear at times of crisis.

Have you seen this image?

What about this one...

Clay Shirky gives an excellent talk re-phrasing the conundrum of information overload. He explains that information overload has existed for centuries (at least since the printing press), so it is not a problem, it is a fact, or a condition that we have naturally immersed ourselves. The problem however is not an increase in information, but that our filters (social and institutional, not just technological) are no longer working.

Two recent findings that highlight different futures for gaming, and what it means for education and communication.

This first is a fun flash game (light bot). The objective is give your bot a sequence of instructions that lead it from the start position to a designated end point, and it gets more interesting when you start to build in a couple of functions (so you don't rewrite repetitive instructions), although it would be interesting if it also incorporated other programming building blocks (arrays, classes, etc.) -- version 2?

The second is a TED talk by game designer David Perry, who starts by asking the question Will video games become better than life? And he comes up with some interesting examples pointing to what he imagines will happen with games, not just in terms of visuals, but in terms of richness of emotional experiences.

Time to geek out with some humorous items related to data viz. I find these items most curious, because they hint at the growing social acceptance of visualizations as a popular forms of communication -- no longer restricted to the financial graphs, scientific models or 8th grade math class.

1 - demetrimartin.com - this guy does some sort of stand-up data viz comedy, clever and inspiring as data viz relates to art.

2 - graphjam.com - a gathering of data viz graph/chart humor of diverse quality. Here are two classics from the 80's...

Smashing Magazine posted a list of 10 futuristic interfaces.

Between clever games, brainwave operated interfaces and holographic displays, there are some pretty nice ideas. Most look like constructive re-imaginings of HCI (human computer interaction). So hopefully in the not-too-distant future we can bust out of the chains that bind us to mouses and keyboards. Admittedly this is already occurring with mobile devices and touchscreens, but not really for general work-related purposes (typing, photo-editing, coding, etc.).

And more interesting, what lies beyond the standard interface model, WIMP (Window Icon Menu Pointing-device)?

Murphy pointed me to this: Ravin Balakrishnan's website. He's a professor at the University of Toronto doing some great work in interface design and HCI.