Here's the premise: The way in which we interact with computers is in the early stages of a paradigm shift. I don't know what the new paradigm will be, although next month I'll report on an interesting theory about that. This month, I'll present some arguments for why we need one and report on the HomeMedia Expo, where the evidence was strong that a new approach to user-interface design is needed.
I can tell you generally where to look for the new UI paradigm. It's in the direction of dynamic media like sound and video, the direction of increased interactivity and user involvement, the direction of the current explorations in virtual reality, the direction of the smart television (possibly not the oxymoron it seems to be), and of home uses for computers. If you say that sounds like more than one direction, I'll concede it; then the direction I'm talking about is the sum of these vectors.
I realize that a lot of people haven't accepted that last paradigm shift in human-computer interaction, the one involving mice and metaphorical desktops; and probably with good reason. But the next paradigm shift could be as different from that one as it was from the character-based, command-line interface.
I think it's entirely possible that the desktop interface invented at Xerox PARC (with the Apple-Microsoft suit coming to trial any day now, it seems appropriate to keep that truth alive) will eventually be a footnote in textbooks on the design of human-computer interaction. I can hear some future teacher struggling vainly to convince a skeptical student that the so-called desktop really was an innovation, "considering how little people knew back then." And it seems possible that the next paradigm of interaction, when it finally shakes out, will appeal to those who now raise legitimate objections to the GUI, or PARCface.
That's the premise, and you don't have to accept it; I won't even argue it seriously until next month. But the phenomena are real: video, sound, MIDI, virtual reality, simulations, scientific visualizations, digital television, cable, pay-per-view, two-way-TV, ISDN, optical media. Whether or not they lead to a paradigm shift in human interaction, and if so what the new paradigm will be, remain to be seen.
Here are several arguments why these phenomena should lead to a new way of dealing with the computer, paraphrased or distilled from the comments of some astute observers:
The hardware needs the exercise. The keys to survival in the computer-hardware industry are: smaller, faster, and more powerful. (Cheaper is also nice, but it has a rather brutal effect on the bottom line.) Fortunately for the hardware manufacturers, those are also the keys to survival in the semiconductor industry, so the hardware manufacturers keep getting the components they need to build the progressively hotter machines. So we can count on computers continuing to get smaller, faster, and more powerful. Safe bet.
So what does that mean for the software developer? That we need new categories of products; products that really exercise the new hardware, gobbling up the increased bandwidth and processing power. Multimedia products that require gigabytes of storage, megabytes of RAM, and the power to put full-motion video on the screen, running at movie speeds. What else are people going to do with a 586?
I heard Bill Gates put forth this pragmatic view, speaking to developers and retailers at COMDEX two years ago. That was his famous "Information at Your Fingertips" speech, and although he had a lot more to say about emerging technologies in that speech, one theme was this "use it or lose it" idea.
So we will get multimedia because the hardware needs it, and multimedia obviously needs a better interface than the PARC model, better than a GUI. A perverse argument, but a plausible one.
We're running out of suckers. That first computer or first spreadsheet package or first word processor that the customer buys is an incredible bargain. The difference in efficiency between doing it by hand or by typewriter and doing it by computer is enormous. The main challenge early computer manufacturers and retailers faced in selling personal computers was in overcoming ignorance and prejudice and fear. That's plenty of challenge, I suppose, but my point is that the benefits didn't need a whole lot of selling once they were pointed out.
Selling the second or third computer is another matter. How do you get a company with hundreds or thousands of perfectly good machines to throw them out and replace them with this year's model? Well, you offer them smaller, faster, and more powerful. But the pitch is harder now. Most word processing is letter writing, most spreadsheets are not huge, and in short, most of the work that people are using computers for most of the time doesn't require any more speed or power than a PC AT. Given that customers have been sold a GUI, they now need at least a 386-class machine, but for most users that's the limit.
Faced with diminishing returns from selling upgrades and a shrinking stream of first-time customers, the industry needs to open the computer up to a broader group of people. With new users come all the new-user problems: ignorance and prejudice and fear and an unreasonable unwillingness to put up with the accepted nonsense. For these people, the installation procedure had better be something like: Stick the cartridge in the slot. This next big group of computer users, if you can find them, will also have less money to spend than current users.
The trade-off is that if you guess right about those potential users, there are a lot of them: more than the whole market for computers today. John Sculley seems more committed to this idea than any other computer company president. He is creating whole new profit centers within Apple to develop products for (and to market products to) the consumer market. For the consumer market, you need to do better than a GUI.
They want their MTV. Communications technology is going digital: television, telephone; this brings it into computer territory, and questions about how these digital media will relate to one another and to computers have to be addressed. Nick Negroponte of MIT's Media Lab has more to say about this than anybody else. He says that a lot of what we think and do with these media is going to get turned upside down. For example, regarding the physical channels he says that everything that currently goes through the air will go through the ground and everything that currently goes through the ground will go through the air. It's hard to believe that the human interface won't have to change at least as much. Consider what you'd get if you just grafted the human-interface design principles implied by a VCR controller onto the Mac guidelines. Despite the fact that Apple and Microsoft and Macromind/Paracomp and everybody else doing multimedia controllers is doing just that, it's a pretty awful idea. Something's gotta change.
It's time to throw the rascals out. Maybe a lot has got to change. There is at least one authority on the subject who is saying that the current GUI human-computer interface design is hopelessly out of date, that it needs to be jettisoned in toto, and that a completely new start has to be made--but that's next month's argument.
The list I rattled off at the beginning of this column--video, sound, MIDI, virtual reality, simulations, scientific visualizations, digital television, cable, pay-per-view, two-way-TV, ISDN, optical media--probably sounded random. It certainly isn't a single technology or even a single industry. But it is a confluence of technologies, a collision of industries, and as such, a single phenomenon, and a significant, if complicated, one. Getting a grip on it is not easy.
There are, though, some newsletters, magazines, and conferences that try with varying success to bring some order to the chaos. They generally have media in their titles. Here is my short list.
Two newsletters do an excellent job of covering the field. Denise Caruso's Digital Media costs $395 a year ($401 Canada, $413 foreign) and is published by Seybold Publications, P.O. Box 644, Media (no kidding), PA 19063. Denise has been writing about computer technology for a long time and knows her stuff. The newsletter is not a solo effort, though; she has other writers. The emphasis is on emerging technologies, the strategies of the big companies, analysis, and informed opinion. The content can occasionally get technical, as in a recent piece on compression strategies.
Tony Bove and Cheryl Rhodes have been at it longer than Denise. Their newsletter, Bove & Rhodes Inside Report, ostensibly covers multimedia and desktop publishing, but they occasionally slip in pieces on operating systems, scripting tools, and other topics that interest them. I find that my interests coincide with theirs. Tony & Cheryl founded (then sold) Publish magazine; as their interests evolved toward multimedia, Inside Report followed. I find it better informed than most other industry newsletters. Inside Report is monthly and costs $245 ($260 in CA including tax, $270 outside the U.S.); Bove & Rhodes, P.O. Box 1289, Gualala, CA 95445.
And the disclaimers: 1. Tony, Cheryl, and Denise are friends of mine. But then, most of my friends are writers, and I haven't promoted all their publications here. 2. I get my issues of Digital Media and Inside Report through subscription exchange with my newsletter, HyperPub. But review copies of software and books are usually free, too.
There are other publications, but I frankly don't see that the area is solid enough to merit a magazine yet; newsletters are the best way to stay on top of a developing industry.
Another way is by going to conferences. The granddaddy of conferences in this realm is probably the Microsoft CD-ROM Conference. It's a good place to hear Microsoft's strategy and to get current on standards and CD-ROM technology.
Another conference that is proving very informative is the annual HomeMedia Expo in Beverly Hills, which covers this whole field. Well, it covers all the technologies I've mentioned as well as the legal and licensing issues. Its perspective is strictly home and entertainment, and I think that's appropriate. If there is a big new group of potential computer users, they aren't in offices; they must be in homes. And computer products for the home market will need a more friendly interface than the ubiquitous GUI.
I attended the first HomeMedia Expo last year and the second this spring. It's put on by American Expositions Inc., 10 Greene Street #703, New York, NY 10012, and costs in the neighborhood of $500 plus airfare and hotel, although if you're actually in the neighborhood (Beverly Hills) and only want to see the exhibits, you can get in for $10.
The collection of companies present or represented at the HomeMedia Expo was interesting: Apple, Sega, Phillips Interactive Media, NEC, Motorola, Adobe, Dolby, LucasArts Entertainment, Sony, Capitol-EMI, Playboy, Kane & Company Investment Bankers, Billboard magazine, cable companies, and television stations and networks. The list of people present was also interesting: Timothy Leary, Michael Nesmith (the Monkee), the voice of Roger Rabbit, the creators of Lawnmower Man, and various game designers, professional musicians, animators, producers, agents, and lawyers. The issues dealt with included home video and sound production and playing, MIDI, virtual reality, simulations, scientific visualizations, digital television, cable, pay-per-view, two-way-TV, ISND, optical media, and licensing issues. It's from this conference that I got the idea that all this stuff fit together. Last year I didn't get it; but this year, attending the sessions, listening to conversations in the hallways, seeing common themes in the exhibits, I started to pick up the gestalt.
Apple is very serious about home media. It has set up new divisions of the company to produce and sell products for this market. Apple's Phillip Schiller spoke about some of the plans. Some of what he had to say has been reported elsewhere: Apple will produce personal digital assistants, or PDAs, small limited-purpose devices that will respond to speech and/or pen gestures. But it is safe to guess that the company is also going to be involved in two-way video, electronic books, multimedia players, and other consumer products. Today's consumer market, though, is not interesting to Apple, which will act as a "technology provider" for a new kind of consumer product, strictly digital and the result of the convergence of industries. Late this year there will be consumer Macs, CD-ROM-equipped Macs that are not for the consumer market, and the first of the (consumer) PDAs. Apple is working with both Sony and Sharp to produce the consumer products, and will work with other partners as well. Unfortunately, that new user-interaction paradigm doesn't exist yet, so the consumer machines will be running System 7.
The first PDA won't have a new interface, either; it will be HyperCardish. But then, according to panelists in the press roundtable session, the first PDAs won't be consumer products in a strong sense: They'll be organizers, executive toys. There was also some discussion on the press panel of the idea that sex will sell the new consumer products, an argument that I made in a column a year ago. Currently, the most popular products are electronic books or interactive CD-ROM presentation of annotated literature, art, or music, but products like Virtual Valerie and MacPlaymate are reminiscent of the early days of the VCR market. The panelists also cited the early days of France's Minitel system, when sexually oriented material was prevalent, and pointed out that this tapered off quickly. The argument was that even if sexual material becomes common in these new media, it will soon fade away.
Possibly. I report for your edification that the Expo did include a session on R-rated content, and that I covered it on your behalf. It was pretty boring.
Licensing, I learned at another session, is a major problem for anyone trying to put together a multimedia product that uses any published material. So bad, in fact, that it's generally cheaper to produce all original material. Not only will you have to negotiate for three different types of rights with the record company, the writer, and the performer of a song you want to use a clip from in a game, for example, but you may have to front a significant chunk of money as a guarantee of earnings. The trickiest part is that you may have to negotiate for rights in the dark: Say you want to use a clip from a movie. The movie company will give (well, not give, but license) you certain rights, but it won't tell you what other rights you need to negotiate for with the actors, the writers of the music playing in the background, and so on. The only indication of who owns what in the movie is in various contracts, and you shouldn't expect the movie company to open up its files to you. So you could find yourself buying rights from someone who already sold all his rights, simply because you don't know what rights he has retained. It's a mess.
An innovative way to get around the rights problem is visible on television every week; it's also a solution to the problems that come up in re-purposing of movie material, where material that wasn't originally intended to be interactive is warped into an interactive format. George Lucas's "Young Indiana Jones" is written and produced explicitly with interactive game spinoffs in mind. That may be a solution only for George Lucas, some of whose employees were present at the HomeMedia Expo.
Finally, over lunch, I learned the secret of this year's Best Actor Oscar. After Anthony Hopkins made the rounds of the talk shows explaining that the essence of his character Hannibal Lector in The Silence of the Lambs was that he never blinked, it turns out that he did blink. All his blink frames were just edited out of the film. In today's media, even a stare can be a special effect.
Copyright © 1992, Dr. Dobb's JournalArguments for a New User-interface Model
Four Maps of Multimedia
UI Begins in the Home