Microsoft Office Labs released a video of how they see user interfaces of the future – The Future Vision Montage. The video got a lot of attention and honestly, the guys behind it shouldn’t be in the Office division, they should’ve been leading the Windows 7 UI, UX teams (no offence to the ones who did the job in the end). A couple of days back at Picnic 09, Amsterdam, Microsoft Office Labs GM Chris Pratley did a presentation on ‘Natural Interfacing’ where he used the Vision Montage video as reference and showed a demo of how they intend to implement the Future Vision Montage video in real life.
Using projectors in the newer mobile phones and combining them with augmented reality some pretty cool Hollywood like stuff can happen. What’s being demoed is a cell phone sized projector projecting on a plexi glass slab, and this can be replicated by mobile phones projecting their display on any similar surface. Chris Partley calls it a physics demonstration and not a product. He even talks about gesture control on dual-sided displays! Here’s the demo video:
(Video courtesy: from Ayman van Bregt on Vimeo.)
And here’s the Vision Montage video, the scene that Chris Pratley refers to about the airport is at 2:50 in the Montage Vision:
I say again, the guys behind Microsoft Courier and these geniuses need to be on the Windows team. Seriously.