There was lots of talk a while back about Jeff Han’s presentation of a multi-touch screen at Ted

Looks very nifty and fun, but too bad they don’t have an real applications in that demo. Like what if you want to do something to those images he’s throwing around. Where is the means for navigating the functions, or the magically disappearing replacement for menus? I am not skeptical of the ideas, I am more skeptical of his Ted presentation. I’ve played with that screen, they do have interesting ideas, and it works pretty well. But they are not well developed as a whole, they are still very much vaguely connected ideas. He talks really big, “the interface just disappears”, yet he doesn’t show very real applications, they seem very much like cool demos without a lot of meat.

A great example of a real paradigm shifting demo is Augmentation Research Lab’s 1968 Demo, aka “the Mother of All Demos”. They introduced the basics of the GUI, hyperlinks, and video conferences in a system that actually worked and that they all used everyday as their main computers in their lab. I really doubt that the researchers at the MRL at NYU are sitting in front of one of those for their main computers everyday.

For more on the 1968 demo, check this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

It has been interesting to follow the progress of this project and its demos. The more recent demo videos have gotten to be much more impressive, they are showing actually useful applications for it. And the language has gotten more subdued. I think they realize that, while very useful, there interface is not a replacement for the WIMP interface steered using a keyboard and mouse. It seems that the culture has been infected with demoitis. People developing new software spend a lot of effort on hype and demos, which inevitably takes away from getting actual work done, so much so that many of these projects that get lots of hype fade away into nothing after the hype.

I don’t think the software creators are only to blame (only largely), it seems that the grants and new media academic establishments expect lots of demos and press, even if it comes at the expense of actual, working implementations. The Augmentation Research Lab’s 1968 Demo were in a very different situation. They were given lots of money and were not expected to show anything substantial for years. When they gave their demo, they had a working system that they had already been using in their day-to-day work for a while. I think this is something that we need to consider if we as a society are going to continue to develop innovative means of interaction.