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10 Futuristic User Interfaces « Smashing Magazine. Advertisement Good user interfaces are crucial for good user experience. It doesn’t matter how good a technology is — if we, designers, don’t manage to make user interface as intuitive and attractive as possible, the technology will hardly reach a breakthrough. To gain the interest in a new product or technology, users need to understand its advantages or find themselves impressed or involved. And here is where creative ideas and unusual interface approaches become important. Innovative doesn’t mean usable and usable hardly means innovative. As usual, it’s necessary to find an optimal trade-off. And some user interfaces manage to achieve just that. Below we present 10 recent developments in the field of user experience design. You may also want to take a look at the related posts: Fez: 2D/3D Gaming Experience Over years we’ve managed to get used to traditional 2D gaming experience. Futuristic Glass Aurora User Interface jDome: New Level Of Gaming Experience Motorolla Sparrow Tilty Snake faceAPI.

Layar Enhances Augmented Reality Browser Platform With 3D Capabi. Layar, one of the first companies to start popularizing the concept of augmented reality browsing using modern day’s mobile phone cameras, is today announcing the addition of 3D capabilities to its AR browser platform for Android and will be demoing the experience starting tomorrow at the Picnic Conference in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. With 3D, third-party developers can now tag real-life objects with three-dimensional text, place 3D objects on top of real-world space and create multi-sensory experiences. The general idea behind the addition of 3D capabilities to Layar is to encourage developers to create more realistic and immersive augmented reality browsing experiences for mobile devices. This in turn should further the overall adoption of the much-hyped technology.

The first demonstration of the Layar 3D experience will be at creativity festival Picnic in Amsterdam from September 23-25. You can view videos and images of the demo here, and we’ve embedded some below. If You’re Not Seeing Data, You’re Not Seeing | Gadget Lab | Wire. As you shove your way through the crowd in a baseball stadium, the lenses of your digital glasses display the names, hometowns and favorite hobbies of the strangers surrounding you. Then you claim a seat and fix your attention on the batter, and his player statistics pop up in a transparent box in the corner of your field of vision.

It’s not possible today, but the emergence of more powerful, media-centric cellphones is accelerating humanity toward this vision of “augmented reality,” where data from the network overlays your view of the real world. Already, developers are creating augmented reality applications and games for a variety of smartphones, so your phone’s screen shows the real world overlaid with additional information such as the location of subway entrances, the price of houses, or Twitter messages that have been posted nearby. And publishers, moviemakers and toymakers have embraced a version of the technology to enhance their products and advertising campaigns.

See Also: Layar Augmented Reality Browser Now World Wide on Android, iPhon. Layar, the jaw-dropping Dutch Augmented Reality browser we wrote about earlier this summer, announced today that it is now available worldwide on Android handsets. Hundreds of new data layers are available to view on top of your phone's camera viewer, from Wikipedia entries when you're looking at geographic points of interest to Trulia real estate listings that are viewable when you point your phone at homes for sale.

Trulia says it only took about 3 hours to build its layer on the Layar data set, something that's very promising for the future of the platform. The program is now coming preinstalled on the Samsung Galaxy (i7500) in the Netherlands, and the company says the iPhone 3GS will be next. Other developers have reported that they expect the iPhone to offer official support for Augmented Reality apps as soon as next month. Of all the Augmented Reality apps we've seen so far, though, Layar is the most exciting because it's a platform.

Prepare Yourselves: Augmented Reality Hype on the Rise. Augmented reality -- or the addition of a layer to the world before your eyes (aka the "real world") using technology -- is the next big tech trend. Already making its debut in everything from mobile apps to kids toys, "AR" will clearly soon be talked about by everyone the way they used to talk about "social media" and "Web 2.0" before that. While augmented reality has its uses -- although many of them just involve oohing and aahing at nifty apps -- this trend is already in danger of being over-hyped, even though it has barely gotten off the ground. AR Apps We've Seen So Far We've been fascinated by augmented reality for some time now, especially after we got wind of a new mobile application built for Google's Android platform called Layar.

Once our interest was piqued, we began imagining what future apps could be built using this platform, thinking up everything from people search to place data. AR Discovered by Marketers. Time to Dial Down the Hype? Augmented Reality Twitter is the Coolest Thing Ever. Augmented Reality: Here's Our Wishlist of Apps, What's. There's another dimension present, everywhere we go, that a growing number of technologists are working to uncover. These people aren't talking about theoretical physics or a magical world of fairies and gnomes - they're talking about information that could offer more context to traditionally physical lived experience.

Augmented Reality (AR) is the phrase being used and this practice of making layers of data available on top of real world experiences could be a big one soon. Improvements in geolocation, bandwidth, mobile devices and APIs are the foundation of this feeling that a useful Augmented Reality may be more realistic today than ever before. AR isn't new, but it's been pretty hokey so far. Now there's a movement to make it really worth doing. It's still such a fanciful prospect that we decided to publish our wish list for Augmented Reality apps we hope someone builds. Place Data The most common dreams for AR are probably concerning historical and other data about locations. Augmented Reality & The Web: Present and Future Scenarios. Augmented Reality (AR) is when virtual graphics and/or data are overlaid onto real world objects.

Many of you have seen this portrayed in movies such as Minority Report and The Matrix. It still seems a bit far fetched in 2009, yet there are apps that are beginning to make it a reality. One is Wikitude, an Android mobile app that mixes location imagery with information from Wikipedia. We first noticed it back in May 2008, when it was announced as one of the winners of the Android Developer Challenge. Wikitude is described on its website as "a mobile travel guide for the Android platform based on location-based Wikipedia and Qype content. " (via Latitude's FriendFeed page) Wikitude represents perhaps the first stage of what is possible with AR.

(via Literanista) Microsoft's Surface app, released in May 2007, is a pointer to this future. There are many potential scenarios for AR. Another interesting consideration is that social software will have a big role to play in future AR apps. Augmented Reality for SketchUp: Now on the Mac.