Via Google Alerts comes this odd interface idea posted by someone at halfbakery.com: Rubber Brain as user interface: "right near your
mouse there is a rubber brain It is a touch interface touch the frontal
lobes to view smartier version or audio cortex to hear music."
Yes, dear users, in the future you will have to understand brain physiology to manipulate things on your computer. What could be easier? Talk about indirect manipulation...
Of course a touchable object on your desk with multimedia controls might make some sense, perhaps even an object that is a squishable stress ball shaped like a brain. My problem is with the location of controls being defined by brain mapping.
What this reminded me of is work at UVA in the 1990s by Ken Hinckley that used 3D props to manipulate the display of brain scans on a screen: Props-based Interface for 3D Neurosurgical Visualization (the picture below is from this page). The doll's head and glass prop have six-degree-of-freedom trackers embedded in them. As the user moves them, the display changes to show the MRI slice that matches the relative positioning of the props. The halfbakery poster mentions something he saw in Microsoft material that inspired him -- maybe this was it, in which case he got the concept a bit confused.
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