Another fantastic TED talk video that illustrates some great concept work to do with desktop or computer interfaces. Years ago my brother showed me some flash swf file where a ball had simple physics and could be thrown around the screen, bouncing all over, but would act like a normal ball, coming to rest on the bottom of the screen. BumpTop applies similar complex physics laws to all of your documents and allows you to treat them (your digital docs) in the same way you might on your real desk.
(Click on the image to watch the TED Talks film in a new window – I have tried for 10 minutes to embed the video here but I am too tired to fiddle with it anymore…)
My only issue I have with this fantastic concept is the way we even interface with such a design. When Anand Agarawala, the creator of Bumptop, demonstrated his idea at TED he used a mouse with a laptop. To me that seemed to almost contradict the very foundation of his idea, the visceral kinaesthetic type approach.
He criticised the point and click style desktops but still used a mouse to do his demo. In my opinion the software has to start marrying up with the hardware – we see Anand showing gesture style moves to register command and menu options and all of these things are and can be implemented on touch screen surfaces with their gesture driven interfaces. I think that such a combination will herald the very best from Bumptop.