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See me, feel me

Touch screens only tap the surface of humancomputer interfaces. A better experience is coming

Large display lab at Queen’s University’s Human Media Laboratory

If you have a tablet computer, you probably remember how quickly it became second nature to interact with it hands on. Soon you were swiping the screen, collapsing and expanding text with the tip of your finger and wondering how you ever got by without it.

But this mode of interaction is just the beginning—and despite their raging popularity, touch screens are actually not very sophisticated or natural. Many researchers believe the computers of the near future will be able to respond to your eye movements, gestures and body language, and read your tone of voice for urgency and respond in a way that best fits the situation. They will take on 3-D organic forms and may even change shape to adapt to their environment or task.

Do what comes naturally

“Think about it. If you want to pick up a pen, you just pick it up. You don’t issue a command to pick up a pen, and then have something else pick it up. ‘Tap and hold’ is not something we do in the real world,” said Chris Harrison, a Ph.D. candidate in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Most interfaces still require a “decoupling” to take place before an action is carried out—clicking on an icon or issuing a command. What people currently do with touch screens is not much more than poking and swiping, he said.

“But our hands can do a lot more than poke at things. Think about how difficult it would be to get ready in the morning if you had to poke at your clothes to put them on, or poke at your buttons to do them up.”

Harrison is researching ways in which using different parts of the hand, such as knuckles or fingernails, could invoke different types of commands. Another area of research looks at turning a small computing device into a projection computer by using a combination of inputs (including vibration and measurement of gestures via small cameras) to turn any object into an extension of your device.

“So one day I might be able to put my phone down at Starbucks and the whole table becomes interactive. And then I’ll pick my phone up and walk away when I’m done.”

This project, called OmniTouch, is exploring a wearable system that enables graphical, interactive and multi-touch input on arbitrary, everyday surfaces. You can even project the computer right onto your own skin, so that your hand, arm or leg essentially becomes your device, because “you are not going to walk around carrying a table with you,” Harrison said.

The changes in mobile adoption have already altered how Web sites are designed. The biggest change has been the demand for responsive Web design (RWD), said Scott Christie, principal at Christie Stewart, a Toronto-based marketing design firm. RWD refers to an approach in which a site is crafted to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing or scrolling. Another big change is that Web sites are getting smaller and simpler: thanks to robust social media sites, rich content can now live elsewhere.

Armura, a novel interactive on-body system, supports both input and graphical output

Chris Harrison, Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University

Pediluma, a shoe accessory designed to encourage opportunistic physical activity. It features a light that brightens the more the wearer walks and slowly dims when the wearer remains stationary

TapSense is an enhancement to touch interaction that allows conventional screens to identify how the finger is being used for input (tip, pad, nail and knuckle) without the user having to wear any electronics

All photos on this page: the OmniTouch project at the HumanComputer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University

Scott Christie, principal at Christie Stewart Top: diagram showing responsive Web design (RWD)

“It’s irresponsible to design a Web site that is not responsive in all platforms,” Christie said. “I also can’t remember a time in the last two years where I have developed a Web site that was more than four pages long.”

Talk to me

When people think of computer interaction, they tend to think about touch and visuals. But what about voice? Torontobased Unified Computer Intelligence was started by three engineering graduates looking to develop something less disruptive than a traditional computer.

“We wanted it to be accessible but not distracting, so that it disappears into the background,” said Leor Grebler, the company’s CEO. The timing was right because “voice recognition technology was getting to the point where it was no longer excruciating to use—plus, it became open.”

Available early 2013 for around $200, the company’s Ubi plugs into a wall outlet and accesses the Internet through Wi-Fi. It has a microphone and speakers and listens for plain language commands directed at it, and communicates back with speech or lights. It runs on Android and has sensors to measure temperature and light. It can hook up to any device already on your network, so that you can “tell” it to turn up your music, or look up a phone number, or ask about the weather. “We see a huge potential for Ubi to assist those who have visual, hearing or mobility impairments,” Grebler said. Any data measured can be stored online or used to trigger alerts to your mobile device or e-mail.

The future’s taking shape

In the near future, predicts another researcher, computers will have the ability to take on any shape or form. This could be through projections, but also through flexible computer displays that will feature more organic user interfaces than we have today. Picture these flexible displays “shrinkwrapped” around any three-dimensional object, and the potential this could hold for interaction with the environment

Dr. Roel Vertegaal of Queen’s University and a sample of a flexible display developed by the University’s School of Computing

Augmenting your reality

Augmented reality (AR) is a hot term right now, driven by the explosion in popularity of mobile devices with cameras. A recent report from Juniper Research in the U.K. found AR elements within mobile applications will lead to nearly 1.4 billion annual downloads worldwide by 2015. Many companies are getting on the AR bandwagon. Canada Post has released an AR app called “Stamps Alive” that enables users to see “3-D games and interactive fun” within the stamp image, according to the company, using phones. The city of Ottawa has an AR-based tour guide app where users can get information about landmarks and events on site.

According to Warren Shiau, director of research, buyer behaviour at IDC Canada, users like these features because they are “passive information gathering” where “the input isn’t coming from you or the device” and they instantly provide an experience that is relevant to you at that moment or physical place.

around you, said Dr. Roel Vertegaal, professor of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at Queen’s University’s School of Computing in Kingston, Ont., and director of the school’s Human Media Laboratory.

One big change has the potential to alter everything: flexible screens will soon be cheaper to produce than rigid screens, he said. They will probably start out in rigid frames, because that’s what everyone is used to. But it won’t be long before product designers and developers will start offering bendable products, or ones with 3-D organic shapes. Eventually, these displays will become “dollar store cheap” and that will open up worlds of possibility that were cost-prohibitive before. Suddenly, the ability to interact with everyday objects will be within reach.

Your whole dashboard may be replaced with a flexible display that shows the road, or you could have entire walls in your house that change from a TV or computer screen to stylish wallpaper, depending on the whim of the user, Vertegaal said. “You might have a coffee cup that knows a lot about coffee, but nothing about beer.”

Warren Shiau, director of research, buyer behaviour at IDC Canada in Toronto, agreed that the price of flexible screens could drop drastically, and this could very well change the whole market and appetite for new devices.

“If you think about what happened with storage, you realize how quickly this could happen. In the ’70s, storage was expensive and bulky, it filled entire rooms, and now you can fit terabytes of storage on a small USB stick,” he said.

Left: Ubi plugs into a wall outlet and accesses the Internet through Wi-Fi Above: Amin Abdossalami, Mahyar Fotoohi and Leor Grebler of Torontobased Unified Computer Intelligence

All five senses

And this new breed of computers won’t just be touch screens, but multi-modal. In other words, these interactive shapes respond to touch but also to users’ gestures, eye movements and voice. Vertegaal is researching ways in which “attentive” devices can determine the appropriate type of interaction. For example, a phone that will go into speaker mode if it “sees” your eyes are focused on driving, or go into vibrate mode if it “hears” you are already on a call.

“Think of all the scenarios people need this for, so they don’t kill somebody while they are driving, for one thing. Devices interrupt us; they are not talking to each other, they are all beeping at once, and this needs to be fixed.”

People will probably still carry around a bunch of different devices, but they will likely not be thought of as devices in the future, thanks to the “dollaramification” of the LED screens that will eventually happen. Phones may hinge and fold “like origami,” their screen sizes adapting to fit the needs of the user, or they might be more like a stack of cards you carry around, Vertegaal said.

“We need to do away with the idea that we will have one device that will do everything. In all other areas of life we have specialized tools for specific tasks. In my kitchen, I have both a corkscrew and a steak knife.”

The ultimate result of all this may be a world in which tangible, interactive computers are able to dynamically change their form, and are virtually indistinguishable from real objects. It sounds like science fiction, but it isn’t. This combination of modular robotics with systems nanotechnology is called claytronics, or programmable matter. There is a lot of research going on in this field, but these realworld transformers likely won’t be hitting stores anytime soon.” B

This sounds familiar

Contrary to what most people think, touch screens are not a new concept. Prototypes were first developed in the late 1960s.

More than 30 years later, Alan Kay, a programmer at Xerox PARC, conceptualized the Dynabook, a portable electronic device the size of a three-ring notebook. It had a touch-sensitive liquid crystal screen and a keyboard for entering information. The device won a Turing Award in 2003 and is said to have heavily influenced the design and development of the laptops and tablets on the market today.

wikimedia commons / marcin wichary

Alan Kay holds a Dynabook

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A YEAR OF optimism

2013 will be a forward-looking year, full of disruptions and surprises

Are you ready for 2013? Probably not, at least not entirely, as the year promises to be a vibrant and eventful one in technology, and we have an optimistic set of predictions for you. This year’s annual Backbone predictions run the gamut, from online entertainment and mobile payments, through to e-commerce, public sector IT and privacy policy.

We brought together individuals ranging from academics to analysts and entrepreneurs to lawyers, to tell us what they think will happen in the technology realm over the next 12 months.

Bricks roar back

Pundits have long predicted the death of bricks-and-mortar retail as e-commerce takes over, but this year our panel sees it differently.

“The relationship between e-commerce and retail will continue to change,” said Derek Smyth, managing director of OMERS Ventures, the venture capital arm of the OMERS pension fund. “We will see interesting blended models. You will see brands like Starbucks leverage bricksand-mortar locations and start to partner with e-commerce providers.”

What might this look like? Smyth envisages a Starbucks with a virtual store featured as a pop-up display on a wall. Items on the wall could change dynamically depending on the time of day, music that’s playing in the store or current events.

We’re starting to see some signs of this already. In the U.S., online grocer Peapod partnered with advertising firm Titan 360 to feature catalogue posters on commuter routes. Shoppers can scan bar codes underneath items while waiting for the bus, and have them added to their online shopping cart.

This is one way for e-commerce firms to partner with retailers and other physical locations. Another is to have retailers handle delivery of non-competing e-commerce items. Amazon is already partnering with 7-Eleven in the U.S., which has lockers designed to take same-day ecommerce deliveries for customers.

Over-the-top video

2013 will be a breakthrough year for overthe-top video, delivered via the Internet rather than conventional network channels, according to experts. “Paid OTT content is crossing seven million subscribers in Canada. That’s 20 per cent of the population, or about half the households,” said Lars Goransson, general manager and group vice-president, IDC Canada, adding that the main market disruptors are Netflix and iTunes. “We expect that trend to continue accelerating rapidly.”

And while IDC doesn’t forecast a drop in subscriptions for traditional TV in its five-year forecast horizon, revenue will remain flat.

The much-expected launch of an Apple-manufactured TV could also shake things up, said Chetan Mathur, CEO of IT and management consulting firm Next Pathway. In spite of analyst predictions that it won’t include unbundled channels, self-diagnosed Mac addict Mathur said it could do to TV what the iPod and iTunes did to music.

“It’s analogous to the [early] 2000s, where there were music companies popping up everywhere. It was a very fragmented industry, much like it is today,” he said. “I believe that Apple has the opportunity to do this once and for all. The key will be the content.”

Makers go mainstream

“Maker” culture has traditionally been a hobbyist one. Technology enthusiasts who like to take things apart and put them together in unexpected ways have sparked a grassroots movement, resulting in magazines such as O’Reilly’s Make,

istockphoto.com

Maker Faires all across North America, and maker spaces in cities such as Toronto, New York and Vancouver.

Ryan Poissant, acting practice lead at Toronto’s MaRS Discovery District technology innovation centre, thinks that maker culture will hit the mainstream in 2013. “It’s moving out of the basement for hobbyists, and into a more viable community that will have many fascinating and unique implications that we can’t even think of,” he said.

Poissant cites companies like MakerBot, which sells 3-D printers, as an example of products aimed at makers. These enable people to publish and exchange their own designs, and create objects from them at home. He’s not the only one who has noticed this trend. “Right now you can see them in the media but they’re just for early adopters,” said Goransson. “We expect people to buy 3-D printers next Christmas.”

Canada: start-up leader

The Canadian tech start-up community has often limped along, hindered by a lack of funding, but things are set to change in 2013. “We saw a doubling of the number of start-ups in the last year,” said Ian Klugman, CEO and president of Kitchener-based Communitech, a non-profit that promotes the area’s technology cluster. “There’s a new level of confidence.”

Much of that comes from new technology funds launched in the last 12 months, but many entrepreneurs are also attracting capital from opportunityhungry investors across the border. “The understanding of what Canada is will change in the next 12 months, from being a great resource economy to being the next start-up nation,” he said. “We will surpass Israel with that title.”

Things are looking good at all stages in the funding chain, said Perry Dellelce, a partner at legal firm Wildeboer Dellelce. “The number of angel investors and the amount of early-stage venture capital has increased,” he said, arguing there is a new level of interest in the Canadian tech scene.

“Everyone’s portfolio in Canada is filled with oil, gas and mining,” he said, adding that these industries have been slow. Expect to see a new generation of post-VC, pre-IPO technology companies approaching Bay Street and Wall Street for public institutional capital investment in about 12 to 18 months, he said.

Dave Olson of HootSuite (left)

Government finds technology

Expect all three layers of government to become more technologically savvy, both in their own service delivery and in their broader economic policy, experts said. “Government will recraft service delivery along mobile and social lines,” Goransson said. “Part of that involves what’s happening at Shared Service Canada, but we expect it to also involve cloud-based services directly to consumers.” 2013 will see a continuation of this, but the public sector won’t reach its goals this year, Goransson said. The Shared Service Canada initiative, which will see the government implement a single e-mail communications system and rationalize its data-centre portfolio, is a multi-year project. Shorter-term techfriendly measures will be policy-based, said Valerie Mann, a partner at law firm Lawson Lundell. “Governments at differ-

“We expect people

to buy 3-D printers

—L ”next Christmas. ARS GORANSSON, IDC CANADA

ent levels are supporting tech start-ups. There’s a need for clusters and industry sectors,” she said, predicting innovative support structures for tech firms.

Provinces are now battling for tech talent. Quebec and Ontario are providing tax breaks for digital media companies, and have enticed some large games developers away from B.C. Last month, the City of Vancouver leased cheap downtown space to rapidly growing start-up HootSuite, which has an option to buy the 33,000-square-foot, $9.6-million property. Mayor Greg Robertson said he had been trying to persuade the firm to stay in Vancouver for a year, rather than depart to Silicon Valley.

“The HootSuite arrangement is indicative of something that’s beneficial for tech companies,” Mann said. Cities like Vancouver are competing and making financial concessions to keep these promising businesses generating employment. They are recognizing that they want to keep their homegrown talent as long as they can.”

Tablets swallow PCs

Expect PC sales to decline by double digits in 2013, as tablets and smartphones continue to take centre stage, said IDC’s Goransson. The hit to enterprise sales will be lower, in single digits, but consumer sales have dropped off significantly and that trend will strengthen. “A lot of that is because of a shifting of dollars to tablets,” he said. “I think it’s fair to say that tablets are actively cannibalizing the PC market.” Tablets will also make even more headway in the enterprise space as bring-your-own device (BYOD) culture takes hold.

Apple will continue to dominate the tablet space, which will see fast expansion in the sub-8-inch product category. “We see that as an opportunity for adoption to grow rapidly among first-time buyers, students, for education and seasonal shopping,” Goransson said. IDC expects mini tablets to make up 30 to 40 per cent of tablet shipments in Canada in 2013.

Titans battle for smartphone 3rd

2011, IDC predicts. RIM, which has been limping along, beleaguered by poor sales, will still outpace Microsoft’s newly released Windows Phone operating system in sales next year. As of late 2012, RIM was still in the latest stages of development with its new BlackBerry 10 OS. “BlackBerry will continue, but it will be a shadow of its former self,” Goransson said.

Others see a different fate for RIM. Mathur doesn’t think the company will see the end of the year, in its current form. “The early indications are that Microsoft didn’t buy RIM because they had Windows 8 in the pipeline,” he said. “RIM has over 75 million active customers around the world, and they are upgrading their OS to BlackBerry 10.”

Microsoft traditionally served a business market in which Apple and Android have yet to establish a strong foothold. The ailing RIM has a strong business footing. “I believe that this is an opportunity for Microsoft to grab this space before it gets rolled over for Android and Apple,” Mathur said.

All about digital payments

The marketplace for small electronic payments needs more development, and Canada could be the country to do it, said Ryan Poissant at MaRS.

There’s certainly room for someone to step up. The marketplace for digital payments is busy and confused. Google has its Wallet technology, which relies on near field communications (NFC), and yet Apple didn’t include NFC capabilities in the iPhone 5. The likes of Square, Verifone SAIL, Intuit GoPayment and PayPal offer a confusing array of choices for digital payments.

In Canada, Rogers and CIBC launched SureTap, an NFC-based mobile payment system that is also usable anywhere that Visa Paywave or MasterCard PayPass are accepted. And in April, the Royal Canadian Mint launched a competition for developers to create applications for its own digital currency, called Mintchip. “They’re one of the most forward-thinking mints, in terms of Crown corporations and government entities, around the world,” Poissant said. “They’ve been thinking for years about what happens when [physical] transactions go away.”

The world is still two years away from seeing clarity in the digital payments space, he said. “But for local players, despite the fact that it’s a little while before we see clarity, Canada will be looked to as folks on the leading edge of this. We’ve been good at embracing new types of payment.”

“The understanding

of what Canada is will change in the

—I ”next 12 months. AN KLUGMAN, COMMUNITECH

Not according to the Task Force for Payments System Review, which in 2011 called Canada’s system for digital payments out of date. If it doesn’t step up, it will leave another two percent of GDP (around $32 billion) on the table each year, said the Task Force. Perhaps that could be just the driver Canada needs to move ahead of the curve in digital payments. Much will depend on how tech-friendly Canadian retailers are, and on whether Mintchip ever actually makes it to market.

wikimedia commons / soggybread Vic Toews

Lawful access will die

“I don’t think we will see the return of lawful access legislation,” said Michael Geist, law professor at the University of Ottawa. He’s referring to Bill C-30, drafted by public safety minister Vic Toews earlier this year and lambasted by privacy groups. “The public reaction to it overwhelmed the government.”

The bill, which sought to give the government unprecedented surveillance powers over Internet use in Canada, was reintroduced to replace original legislation drafted before the last election. Even business users balked. ISPs complained to Backbone about the costs of installing the surveillance equipment requested in the bill, which would have to be passed on to the customer.

“It is a political hot potato,” Geist said. “They could just leave it as is, which would be a bit of an embarrassment. Another alternative is if they prorogue. That would allow them to formally kill it.”

istockphoto.com / Troels Graugaard

From BYOD to MYOD

Bring Your Own Device was the buzz term of 2012, but 2013 will need a greater focus on managing personal devices in the workplace. “These devices can create weak spots in robust, resilient enterprise computing environments,” said John Weigelt, national technology officer, Microsoft Canada. “One way to help maintain confidence in the corporate environment is to perform some management on devices that are brought into the environment.”

Expect to see more password policy enforcement and device wiping capabilities in enterprise environments, he said. The most forward-thinking and securityconscious companies will fully manage mobile devices as they would manage traditional desktops in the organization. 2013 marks another year of timid recovery for the Canadian economy overall, but the optimism and renewed focus on growth opportunities in the tech sector highlighted by people like Klugman and Dellelce could be just what the economy needs. Disruptions in electronic payments and digital entertainment could spark new business opportunities for savvy Canadian start-ups, and a continuing sea change in client-side devices could lead to enhanced productivity in the workplace. If our panel’s predictions are correct, the next 12 months will be exciting ones indeed. B

All content also at: backbonemag.com/ magazine