Speaker: Tim Huckaby Chairman of InterKnowlogy.com
Uses Awesomium control to embed web content into WPF application for kiosks/etc.
Natural User Interface (NUI) = touching the screen (or manipulating the screen without touching it)
Tenants
- The content should define the experience
- The “Grandma Huckaby Test”: the ability to effectively use the kiosk without training
- No one should have to touch the machine to update content (remote deployment while running)
- Updating content should happen centrally and should have automated delivery
- Cant go to deep screens wise (maybe 2/3 levels deep at most)
If something is moving (even simple animation) a humans attention is caught. You are going to look at it.)
Touch Capable Hardware Implementations:
- Capacitive – Think electric impulse (iPhone and others)
- Infrared – Expensive ones. Think laser pointer(s) (best fidelity of touch… costs 10’s of thousands of $$)
- Resistive – Think push down and drag (old, No ‘cool’ devices use this anymore)
Tip: 98% of time 2 people is all a device like this needs to support, though people think it will need to support more. The use cases just don’t support the need to support more.
Given a typical user experience < 5 min on a kiosk type device, you need to keep the navigation shallow and intuitive.
.NET 4 has decent support for touch. Before .NET 4 was very minimal support.
.NET 4 turned touch into a first class citizen for developers.
WPF does support true distributed computing. (with .NET 4 version)
Convinced we gotta do mobile apps native. The user experience in particular requires it.
“Azure is easy for .NET Dev’s”
Important aspects of storage:
- Space consumption & Transactional cost
- Some storage is designed for unlimited storage but you pay per transaction
- Other storage mechanisms are designed for limited storage but unlimited transactions
Biggest problem with Azure now is: No way to really know how much this thing is going to cost.
Kinect can authenticate (differentiate between faces… and when voice is there, voices too)
Hooking Kinect into the windows OS sure looks to be a step to having a ‘Minority Report’ type User Interface for computers.
This session was an excellent way to end the conference for me. Tim is an excellent speaker and showed some really interesting technologies. Peaked my interest regarding looking into some possible UI design changes we might be able to make.