Adaptive Path and Mozilla: future of Web-browsing video
Design firm Adaptive Path worked with Mozilla Labs to create an engaging concept video, titled Aurora, to communicate a forecast of future Web-browing experiences. From Adaptive Path:
With Aurora, we set out to define a plausible vision of how technology, the browser, and the Web might evolve in the future by depicting that experience in a variety of real-world contexts.Aurora (adaptive path)
The release of Aurora is part of the launch of Mozilla Labs’ browser concept series, an ongoing initiative to encourage designers and developers to contribute their own visions of the future of the browser and the Web. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be releasing more video segments, as well as background material showing just what went into imagining the future of the Web and translating that into a video.
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yeah, awesome, neato - but not everyone will need to utilize all that prettiness. FORM vs FUNCTION. i guess they got the MAC niche down, where they'll just create a need.
i'm pro-mozilla, but i'm just sayin'.
Most of this stuff is 'Doable' but at the level in which its being presented in this presentation will require some really tight code to run even moderately slow on machines at least a year or two from now. The ideas are being experimented with like 3d windows, and the sort. One problem with some of the more 'interactive' datasets is that everyone has their own ideas at what level of interactivity they want to allow, or even how that data is presented and named... transferring her personal rainfall graph over the national weather service rainfall graph would require both of them to be not just in the same units (obviously) but also to be named similarly for the correlational levels to be mapped appropriately. We have some tried and true conventions when it comes to web browsing (login and password fields for example) but to expect this across the web is very difficult to get everyone in the same library stacks let alone the same book or even page, its like herding cats.
And this doesn't even take in to account as to what the actual website will allow you to do with that data... yes there will be hacks that rip data for personal use in whatever form you desire but how long before such a practise is regarded as wrong in either a legal sense or simply a copyright sense. We are still dealing with Data as being this proprietary entitlement... its MY data and I can let you see it but don't dare actually USE it.
at 2:12 "It's gotta be here somewhere" was exactly what I was thinking. Ugh, That a mess of files there, The only way that mess of an operating system is acceptable is if it's got a damn good search feature and heavy use of keyboard shortcuts. Like Spotlight from the year 2020.
I don't think that is a computer I'd want to use.
When the woman is browsing on the desktop, (what they call "the special view") it looks like they took inspiration of the ocean web navigator used in the anime cowboy bebop by the character Ed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79Yv1niIqus
Wow. I know the purpose of these concept videos is to be pie in the sky wheeeee and get you thinking about things that might actually be useful, but that was simply awful.
It looked like Aqua + Digg Swarm + Skype in a blender. All you're missing is all the windows wobbling and jiggling like jello every time they move, which is what *nux UI people think is the height of sophistication (Beryl).
More importantly, my current browser/desktop setup is much more functional and usable if you just added all those magic do-what-i-mean graphing tools to it.
I'm in agreement with everyone here, what future is this?
Sure I want a 3D desktop environment (like inside a sphere, where I can pull things off and put them back on the inside surface...)
But what they are showing is well beyond what technology can do today. And I'm sorry to say only ONE company could even remotely make something like this happen, and this Microsoft. Simply because they own the OS, browser, and products that make most of your "data" (word, excel, ect..)
100% interopobility is a LONG LONG way off (like doubtfully my lifetime.)
Okay, I made myself watch it again. In retrospect I was a little harsh (comment #5) - I do like some of the ideas like the user stack and everything on the page being push/pullable/serializable, but the navigation cloud is just so hideous it overwhelmed everything else. I am ambivalent over letting other people into my browser window live, but I'm sure that'll be very useful for some people.
I think they've got some good ideas, and let's face it, the horrifically impractical parts of the concept will get shaved off by the end product anyway.
I like the idea of gestural pop-up UI, and think we're likely to see more of the like, and soon (see both Wii and iPhone for gestural love), but agree that much of the rest of this is pure prototype fiction.
A pseudo-self-sorting cloud of windows and other data snippets? Why not fly over a 3d/VR field of unixy cubes à la Jurassic Park?
But then this concept is meant to be more creative and less predictive. Still, back to the drawing board. Please keep the ideas coming.
We're still using the mouse/hand/pointer metaphor in the future? Where's my multi-touch?
This is the most frustrating looking UI I've ever seen. Why would you want to move away from ease of finding things? "It's gotta be here somewhere..." It took her forever to do things that currently would take me seconds to do. Is progress defined by how many super-neato cool UI effects there are?
This is what happens when you ask asshole graphic and web designers to envision the future of computing.
Here's some of my issues with "Aurora":
I could go on and on but this is just terrible. Whatever Mozilla spent on this is way too much, unless their goal is to learn what not to do.
I'm looking forward to the repost of this on boing boing in 10 years. Nearly everything in this video will be laughably non existent or it will have completely missed the mark.
I can just see it now:
What the Cubs lose? They've taken the world series 3 years in a row.
Look how small that screen is.
Where the heck is the network switching notification? "Now leaving AT&T approved webspace - your bandwidth is no longer optimized"
Where's the tablet screen? (think Nintendo DS on a grand scale)
They thought we'd still have rainfall?
It's a bit blah. But it make me realise how much 3D could help clear up some current issues.
I'd love to see the Mac OS X dock take on a carousel form instead of a linear bar. Make it round, make it spin and that would mean you could add as much as you like without seriously impacting on clutter.
Wow. This is so ridiculous. The "radial menu" is wack.
"acrocker" is right. She spends so much time looking for the data.
Computers need to move in a direction that accepts input from more than just touch input sources. Voice commands should augment keyboard and mouse. When she is thinking out loud he computer should be listening to that and sorting the data and/or modifying the interface accordingly.
I agree that web browsers of the future will have a full-screen, data-immersion component that allows you to easily transfer data from an HD to the cloud, but clusters of files need tags and symbols to indicate the relationships. Is that where "semantic similarities" between "objects" comes from?
Safari can already make "webclips" into "widgets" so the graph-grabbing is a no-brainer. Time Machine uses the z-axis for time. Exposé clusters things automatically. I think adaptive path owes Apple a hundred pennies.
dragnonize (right there above me) is right - where's the voice?
i still play with the mac voice control every once in a while, but they haven't updated it since it appeared on my first gen iMac in '98 (i don't even think they've changed the little circle widget that let's you know it's listenign) . i keep hoping the next OS announcement will include revolutionary voice control, the fruit of a decade of fine-tuning.
also, yeah, at some point everything's gonna go tablet.
also i want a duplicator and a holodeck.
I agree with #14 and #15, voice commands would be great. Remember that scene in Blade Runner where Deckard is analyzing the photograph? That's the kind of voice navigation I want.
For me, the first indicator that the people spitballing "innovative" ideas are missing the mark and not really being too creative was their fictional adoption of using little alerts sounds to accompany every process, just like so many decades worth of TV shows and movies which feature supposedly advanced computer UIs.
Whether those alert sounds would actually evolve into something useful is irrelevant to the demo video; as shown, they're presently nothing more than ear-candy. That they chose to take the time to create (or otherwise, "appropriate" from another source) the sound files and incorporate them into video doesn't say a lot for the level of innovation being conjectured. The alert sounds seem like something a wanna-be film director would insist on being added, because "...all those Hollywood-types do it in their productions, so let's add them our production so that we look more professional." To paraphrase 10cc's song from 1976 ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJMF59OC64Y ):
And don't even get me started about that ridiculous peripheral she's using with her soon-to-be-severely-hurting left arm...
Am I the only one getting severely choppy video? If it's any indication of how effectively the technoinnovation will be implemented, count me out.
Apple did the "futuristic computer lifestyle" video in the 80s and it was about this good. Maybe better.
I couldn't even make it past a minute of that crappy video. Come on marketing people, keep it simple and convey your ideas quickly. I bet kids in High School could make this better and more interesting. What a waste of money on fancy logos and animation.
Destructor66, I agree. All I have to say is dream on (which is good): dream of all that bandwidth, because you'll need it.
Hmm...I copy/pasted my comment #16, above, in the comments section on the AdaptivePath site. It took a minute, then it was approved for public viewing. Then they removed it. WTF is that all about?
Posted it again, just because.
#17, that's the first thing I thought too: "Oh listen to that, just like all the other computers on TV and the movies--they all make noises every time something pops up." Does anyone like that?
All I'm getting is the spinning 'Vimeo' logo. No video to watch. I'f assume it's at my end.. but I'm still getting the flash logo.
Is this because I nuked crossdomain.xml?
I'm surprised at the negative reactions. Perhaps not many of us have seen these sorts of concept videos before. They're often laughably bad or over the top in the aesthetics or pure design department. It frees you from tying the ideas presented to a specific implementation.
What did we see? A not so novel organizational system and an aggressive use of microformats. Sounds pretty good to me.
The video is awesome (have a look at the second clip on vimeo, as well).
I would like just to point at a strange thing -- it will take a lot of effort to make data interchangable between websites (see how she's taking a graph from one page and throws it on the other).
The another thing is that IMHO almost any 3d interface is unusable by default (take a look at almost any video-game and try to imagine spending 6 hours browsing through the menu system), I hope I am wrong about it.
The third thing is -- clicking the browser menu makes sounds in this video -- that's funny (Just like in the movies critisized by Cory).
@elapsv;
don't get your point about data not being interchangable. Heard of XML, RSS?
You have to remember that Adaptive Path are not a research institute - they are a consultancy. As such, they have to keep their PR machine rolling with stuff like this. What is more, it doesn't have to make much sense to the likes of you and I, it needs to make sense to cigar-smoking CEOs tied to their shareholders who see AP and think "Boffins! Hire 'em so we can show we're innovating at the next shareholders' meeting!"
So basically, this is just some marketing puff designed to get AP on to pitch rosters for big clients. All agencies do this in some form or another when they want to expand their client base. Don't treat it as any serious futurology (it's obviously not anyway - radial menus... LOL!!)
I must not have enough imagineer in me to want any of that.
If the video is a bit choppy it might be because the servers are getting pounded. The video has gotten about 250 thousand plays in about two days and the hits just keep on coming.
2leonjacobs: Of course I've heard about data interchange, but nowadays it's a trouble to switch from Movable Type to Drupal for example and imagine trying to standardize information format for all the web-sites -- this will take ages, I fear.