From the press release announcing the findings:

“If a robot just sticks out its hand blindly, or uses motions that look more robotic than human, a person might feel uneasy working with that robot or might question whether it is up to the task,” Katsu Yamane, Disney Research, Pittsburgh senior research scientist explained. “We assume human-like motions are more user-friendly because they are familiar.”

Despite the robot pictured on the Disney page touting this research looking like the mechanical, blue-haired skeleton that haunted my childhood nightmares, its attempts to grab the purse from the person do seem reactive to the human’s gestures, as opposed to the robot just sticking his arm out there and the person having to accommodate it. And that sort of naturalism will be important as we bring more robots into our homes and workplaces.

For example, an MIT group used a dancer’s motions to build a robotic bartender in a quest for naturalism — even though that robot doesn’t interact with people.

Today, designers try to endear robots to us with quirky noises (like R2D2) and maybe light displays or LED faces — anything to help anthropomorphize them. But as robots become more human-looking they can also become more sinister — achieving that same uncanny valley that Disney and other content companies have struggled with in animation. Remember the dead-eyed stars of the Polar Express that you probably couldn’t empathize with? The jerky movements of a home health robot might engender similar feelings — or worse — they may scare people.

Building the natural gestures of the Disney robot took the creation of a hierarchical gesture database that the robot can access as it detects the person passing something to it. In the Disney paper research, the robot is not only able to reach for the handbag, but when the human attempts a fake pass to the robot, the blue-haired monstrosity robot is able to adapt. From the release:

To enable a robot to access a library of human-to-human passing motions with the speed necessary for robot-human interaction, the researchers developed a hierarchical data structure. Using principal component analysis, the researchers first developed a rough estimate of the distribution of various motion samples. They then grouped samples of similar poses and organized them into a binary tree structure. With a series of “either/or” decisions, the robot can rapidly search this database, so it can recognize when the person initiates a handing motion and then refine its response as the person follows through.

Even if you don’t have an opinion on how naturally robots should move, this research brings home the awesome amount of work it takes to build computers and robots that mimic the capabilities of a person. Much like computer visualization, the science of robotic interaction takes a problem the size of a mountain and has to chip it down into grains of sand using a toothpick to find solutions. It’s a testament to human curiosity that people are willing to try.

Also, I expect Disney might be lured by the idea of natural-looking robots roaming its theme parks. My only question is would they be dressed up as characters or working the cash register at the gift stores.

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The startup, founded last year and based in Waterloo, Ontario, reminds me of the Leap Motion guys, who are building a gesture-interface for PCs and laptops using sensors. Both are taking the relatively “flat” methods of motion-based input, such as touch or mice, and making them 3D. Now you can move not just left and right, but also above and below a plane.

So far, the MYO bracelets will ship at the end of the year for the first 25,000 people who pre-ordered the armbands, with another batch coming in 2014. They cost $149, which is pretty compelling if even a few decent apps are available. Games are a good entry point for this type of gesture-based control with the MYO sold as an accessory of sorts.

But if the company makes is SDK available, I can imagine it as a controller for a variety of things, including the connected home. Imagine wearing one of these armbands and using gestures to control your stereo from across the room or even as a way to lock the doors with a motion as you leave the house. Of course, that assumes a device that you’d wear constantly, which then gets us into the thorny UI issue of how to tell the device when you want it to pay attention and take action based on a motion, as opposed to when you are just scratching your nose or waving hello to a neighbor.

For a taste of the device and possibilities, check out the video below:

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Bundling is good, but integration is always better in the consumer world, since most consumers may not have any idea that they want gesture-based controls or even why. Leap’s system works like a Kinect with an exterior piece of hardware attached to the computer that detects hand motions with a high degree of accuracy — within 1/100th of a millimeter. As for why someone might want this on their machine, it’s an enabler for new types of computing experiences.

When the company raised an additional $30 million earlier this year, I wrote how excited I was at the potential for gesture-controls to change how we think of the PC by enabling new applications like molding clay, manipulating spreadsheets in 3-D or playing an instrument. From the post:

That’s a nice win in the computing space, but the real question for me is can a new UI change how we interact with computers, and perhaps help keep the PC relevant? David Holz, the a co-founder and CTO of Leap told me that he helped invent the product because he wanted to do things on his computer, like play an instrument or make a model, that were made far too complicated by the existing programs limited by drop down menus necessitated by having a keyboard or mouse interface.

This deal with HP may help drive the adoption of more of those Leap-specific applications by helping deliver a larger audience for developers. Already Leap has sent out 12,000 units for free to developers to prime the pump for new applications, but now it needs to give those programmers an audience. As is always the case with a new user interface platform, it could be the most awesome experience since the touch screen, but if people don’t use it, the apps won’t arrive.

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Since the early days of Apple, their approachable design made digital software and interfaces accessible and usable, to the extent that even a child could use them. But their innovation since the launch of the first iPad has either been incremental (for example iOS or the iPad Mini) or flawed (for example Siri and Apple Maps). Their software design has also remained stale with many contending that a refresh is overdue. Arguably, Apple is now playing defense, giving competitors like Microsoft and Google space to innovate and set trends in interface design across devices and platforms.

Steve Jobs was—notoriously, to many members of the design community—a fan of skeuomorphism, a style that relies on real-world metaphors and textures in digital interfaces. Fake leather, wood, paper and glass became commonplace in Apple applications, in addition to real-world metaphors like bookshelves, paper shredders, and even casinos. While skeuomorphism might have been beneficial in the early days of computing in helping less-tech-savvy types navigate a user interface, it now feels out of place in a world where most people are using a host of digital interfaces throughout the day, and where younger people have never even experienced physical rolodexes, paper shredders or giant desk calendars. From a design perspective, when used excessively skeuomorphism is at best out-dated, at worst confusing and tasteless. More importantly though it feels at extreme odds with Apple’s hardware, which is designed with sophistication and constraint. So where might Apple’s designs go?

Image courtesy of Apple

Looking at competitors like Microsoft, its new Windows UI style, across operating systems, is at the direct opposite end of the spectrum from skeuomorphism. It’s a modernist Swiss style, where all excessive embellishments are removed. The life in the experience comes from content and transitions, not from visual UI ornaments.

The wildly successful Android OS lands somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, between skeuomorphism and the new minimalist Windows style. While visually Android is not leading the way (and here I include all of the Android licensees), there are now several interaction patterns and solutions that are better designed and more advanced than what iOS offers.

Microsoft has claimed the minimalist corner, and a radical Apple departure from their current UI style could be confusing to existing users, and would also admit defeat (which is not a very Apple-like trait as well). Apple has long had a human-centered design focus, and has gone further than most to make technology accessible to everyone. Apple’s challenge then is formidable: To retain the focus on simplicity, accessibility and ease-of-use, while at the same time refreshing their UI style and introducing design consistency across their increasingly wide range of software and services. It’s a tall order, and will need investment, focus and talent.

The most transformative devices today are ingenious pieces of software wrapped in desirable hardware. The Nike+ FuelBand or the self-learning Nest thermostat are examples of new software products that are wrapped in well-designed hardware. Apple has long been the master at this, but competitors are encroaching on their territory. Microsoft has gone against its hardware suppliers in creating its own showpiece for Surface—a move it had to make to ensure that the hardware maximized the potential of the software. But creating this combo is not easy, and Apple will have to work hard to stay on top. Various pieces of Apple software on a range of different devices connect to incredibly advanced services and algorithms in the cloud. Orchestrating this, and presenting the services to people in a way that’s easy and delightful to use, is very challenging. Not many companies do it well and consistently (which is why the relative failure of the complex Siri and Apple Maps services weren’t a big surprise for some).

With iOS, Apple showed the world how the graphical touch paradigm should work. Modern touch interfaces are now characterized by responsive, fluid and direct interaction, while tapping, swiping and pinching have become dominant gestures. Apple led the way in making touch interaction mainstream. Looking ahead, interactions will move beyond the screen into thin air, and both input and output will increasingly use voice. Apple now has an opportunity to once again lead the way and design the dominant interactions for what comes next in computing.

The wearables category will need great design to go mainstream, and Apple’s entry in the race could be inspiring. A radically redesigned iOS would be very interesting, and a confident Apple entry into “control point” services like search or commerce would be fascinating. If Cook and Ive are able to succeed with a bold investment in a service play, they will not only create immense value for Apple, but also demonstrate that they can pull off their own innovations, rather than just incremental changes to what Steve Jobs envisioned.

Om Malik’s recent piece here about the change-up at Apple highlighted an increasingly schedule-driven release culture under Tim Cook’s leadership. This might indeed become a challenge for software innovation. If the question “when do we ship” ever becomes more important than “what do we ship,” true innovation, risk-taking, and design excellence become hard.

A radical refresh of iOS, a category-defining entry into wearables, or a confident push into services like search or commerce could spell the real making of Tim Cook. Right now the jury is still out. For us designers, Jony Ive now has the chance to upgrade his status from mere legendary design Lord to design demigod. I hope he takes it.

Olof Schybergson is CEO and Co-Founder at the service design consultancy, Fjord. (Twitter: @fjord.)

Apple image courtesy of Shutterstock.

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InteraXon, the maker of the Muse headband (seen above), has listed it device on Indiegogo in hopes of raising $150,000 for building out a mass-produced headband that translates your mental commands into a computer action. The example they show on the site is playing a game using an iPad, where the rotation of a wooden block occurs when the user focuses on it. The user tilts the iPad to change the angle of the rotation.

The ideas behind the Muse are echoed in a project released by Chaotic Moon Studios earlier this year called the Board of Imagination, whereby a user controls a skateboard that connected to an iPad and a brainwave reader made by a different company called Emotiv. In that use case, the user’s focus is what makes the skateboard move forward.

The Emotiv EEG headset.

The idea of a real brain to computer interface is cool and has been around for years. There are wonderful examples of people using their minds to control wheelchairs or even hooking prosthetic limbs into a person’s nervous system and then learning to control them using their thoughts. There are also similar research efforts combining brain waves with vision tracking that could make an even more effective UI. But to turn our thoughts into something computers can understand — and perhaps make the most efficient UI of all – we need several things to happen:

1) Comfortable implementation — Today it’s a headband or a helmet that reads brainwaves from external EEG sensors, but to get to the subtleties that a true user interface would require we’d need to put sensors inside the head or add more components, such as the vision mentioned in the research above. But if we want to rely on the brain, then we need better electronics that could be implanted into a person’s body, which requires new coatings and research into chips and sensors that is ongoing. We also need to learn more about the brain.

2) A compelling use case for the UI to drive usage and adoption — As William Hurley of Chaotic Moon told me when I asked him if I could ride the Board of Imagination, focusing is essential. You don’t already know how to work these interfaces, you have to learn how to focus on a way that the EEG readers can understand. The Muse may help with this regard, because by letting users play simple games, they can train their brains to focus in a way detectable by the EEG monitors. Some of the use cases even give people a brain score that shows how well they “focus.” Games and personal improvement apps seem like a good reason for people to adopt the technology and thus, get it into the mainstream.

3) A set of standards for the hardware and implementation of a brainwave database — A good UI platform should be like the keyboard or language recognition. There needs to be a consistent set of meaning for each thought across all platforms. So if there are three different brainwave reading helmets on the market, you need to be able to control objects by using all of them the same way. That will speed adoption and the development of applications.

So, while the Muse is a cool project and may indeed usher in a new user interface, there’s plenty of other work going on in this realm and a lot more needs to happen. But, when we consider the massive amounts of digital information we’re going to be negotiating in real-time, the idea of some kind of computer-oriented telekinesis is pretty compelling.

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Is this “less is more” approach revolutionary? Nope. Evolutionary? Absolutely.

As designers, we admire Clear’s UI, and we think it ties into some trends we’re watching here at Fjord (a digital service design agency). We’re betting that we will see more of this stripped down approach in the near future thanks to three big industry trends:

1.   A “mobile first” approach to features

The small-screen real estate of mobile devices has forced companies to scale down the bells and whistles and extraneous content afforded by the web, prioritizing features and services that make the most impact for the business and customer experience.

This also means that, in order to be successful, these types of applications are focused on a very narrow subset of features. In the case of Clear, not only did the company select the most rudimentary functions in a to-do list, it also followed through with a minimalistic form in the interface.

A simple interface requires paring down interactivity to its barest essence. It requires prioritizing features and focusing on the essentials needed for the desired outcome. The challenge is to know how much you need to create a viable and desirable product, how much can be stripped away, and how to prepare for scaling up the product and service. It will be interesting to see how these applications evolve and scale (or choose not to).

2. Thinking in 4-D and making the user a magician

User interface designers are beginning to realize there is no longer a need to hang on to representations of real life objects and drag them into the digital space. Digital is something else. It gives the user magical powers. It is no longer the user, a mouse and a complicated ballet of hand eye coordination. It is the user directly manipulating a screen or an object to access a magical, four-dimensional world (time, space, people, information) that exists invisibly almost anywhere the user goes. Clear’s focus on gestural UI bestows this sense of magic by escaping the traditional paradigm of check boxes and text inputs that normally exist with digital to-do lists.

3. Getting Agile with it

Both designers and mobile platforms are pushing toward cinematic user interface designs. While motion is nothing new in every day life, appropriately and meaningfully adopting it into consumer-facing applications poses a new set of challenges for designers who are more accustomed to formulating designs using static wireframes. A new prototyping and blended-discipline approach to software and product development such as the Agile method and the new Lean UX movement are making it easier and more acceptable than ever before to create and communicate dynamic, looks-like, feels-like prototypes. This has allowed for a cinematic approach to design that employs more dynamic movement. And much like a good movie, the most crucial bits are often found between those still frames.

It’s exciting to see Clear’s bold interface and the new capabilities it presents. But the Clear app is just a hint of the exponentially more thrilling interfaces we are likely to see in a coming wave of more complex products and services that will go far beyond the to-do list.

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It’s fun to watch her interact with these things, not only because she’s already better at some of the games than me. The really interesting stuff happens when stuff doesn’t work the way she expects it to, or when she finds ways to use tech that I hadn’t thought of. That’s when I get to learn how tech should work, and why some of my assumptions about it are wrong. That’s right, I’m a 35 year old journalist who has been covering tech for 15 years, getting schooled by a 4 year-old. And I’m loving it.

Here are five things my daughter taught me about tech:

Touch screens change the way we see the world

My daughter must have been two when we took her to a mall that had backlit billboards, advertising some movie that used what looked like icons as part of its title. She went up to it and started pressing and swiping things, fully expecting that something would happen. It was funny, but also very revealing.

I grew up with the command line, and gradually made the jump to graphical user interfaces. Both shaped the way I think about technology, the way I organize information and the way I interact with new types of devices. My daughter’s experience with technology is fundamentally different. She has never used a mouse, and still has trouble using the trackpad of my Macbook Pro.

Her experience is instead completely shaped by mobile devices with touch screens, which is why she naturally assumes that that any screen is a touch screen. Her view of the world is much more tactile, and she prefers to navigate surfaces to retrieve information instead of diving into nested structures. In short: She wants everything at her fingertips, which gives her a much more organic, immediate connection to technology.

Voice needs to be ubiquitous (or Siri is a huge deal)

"Search for penguins!"

I use a slightly older Android phone, the T-Mobile MyTouch 3G Slide, which was released before Google added voice commands to much of Android. It includes a somewhat gimmicky “Genius button,” which offers voice-activated search for contacts, local businesses and web results. I showed it to my daughter, trying to impress her with searches for nearby ice cream shops. She loved it.

Then, a few days later, she used my phone to watch videos on YouTube, and started to scream: “Search for penguins! Search for penguins!” That’s when I understood that voice on mobile isn’t just something that helps to keep the eyes on the road when you try to pull up an address. It’s an essential part of the device.

We talk to our phone all the time – so it should understand us, and pull up some good penguin videos whenever we feel like it. At least on mobile devices, voice needs to be ubiquitous. Granted, some people may feel a little uncomfortable talking to Siri in public. But for the generation growing up now, it’s going to be weird not to talk to your phone. Why would you use a painful onscreen keyboard if it can hear us just fine?

Linear TV is dead

I’ve been writing about the future of television for years, but one of my biggest aha-moments came when my daughter watched TV at her grandparents a while back. She’s used to watching videos on YouTube and Netflix, (but her grandparents at that time only had basic cable. Guess what happened when her favorite show got interrupted by a commercial? She got mad. Really, really mad.

That’s when I understood that linear TV has no future. Sure, we’ve all used DVRs to free ourselves from the schedule of broadcast and cable channels, and online sources of content have added even more flexibility. But we also still remember the experience of passively consuming hours of TV without interruption, including ads and whatever was on next. Kids growing up today don’t have that experience, and TV is about watching what they want, when they want it.

Games are social

My daughter's favorite game: Bakery Story.

Okay, this one may be obvious to many, it it was still an eye opener for me: I’ve never been a big gamer, and I’ve been having a particularly hard time understanding casual gaming. I just don’t see the point of putting hours into maintaining a virtual farm. My daughter on the other hand is magically drawn to games that feel like work to me.

Her favorite: Bakery Story, a game that consists of managing a bakery and selling cake to people. It’s pretty challenging for her, but there’s one thing she really gets a kick out of: She can spend hours visiting other people’s bakeries, checking out what they have done to the place and what kind of pastries they’re offering to their customers. It’s like taking a peek into other people’s lives, much in the same way we look at the Facebook profiles of our friends – and to her, it’s much more rewarding than getting points in some traditional game where the score doesn’t matter to anyone but her.

The alive web will be huge

Here’s another thing that’s interesting about my daughter playing Bakery Story: Whenever she visits other people’s bakeries, she talks about “calling them.” And if you think a little bit about it, equating real-time social experiences with phone calls totally makes sense. We’ve been using Skype video calls a lot to keep her connected to relatives in Europe, so she is used to the fact that phone calls are becoming more and more about telepresence.

You don’t just call people to talk to them, you call people to share an experience, show them your room and generally spend some time together. That’s the very same idea that also has made Turntable.fm and Google’s Hangouts so popular. It’s not about connecting with intent and purpose, but about sharing real time experiences online. Services that tap into this need are going to be huge, and the generation growing up with them now will embrace them as a natural extension of the technology that surrounds them.

Want to learn more about the alive web and the way companies can design social and intelligent objects for future generations? Then check out our Roadmap conference, which includes speakers like frog’s chief creative officer Mark Rolston and Dreamworks Animation CTO Ed Leonard.

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Instead of thinking about the buttons on a phone or a laptop, manufacturers and designers need to think about what will happen when computers are embedded in everything and connected all the time. Instead of computing’s being confined in a box on a desk or in the hand, computers will be everywhere, pulling data from a variety of places. Understanding how those computers will pull information about their environment, relay that data to users and then interpret what users want them to do creates a web of interaction that will require new ways of thinking and design.

In fact, user interaction might be a very minimal part of the overall design. For example, Rolston described a wearable glucose monitor that has elements embedded in the body, a monitor interpreting the data from the user’s bloodstream and a wearable screen for the patient to interact with. Of those three elements, the patient input screen is likely gathering the least important information and must convey complicated information simply.

In a conversation after his panel, Rolston explained that the challenges inherent in designing interfaces in such a world will come from devices trying to understand a user’s intent, as we build out new ways to interact with them, such as motion. How will a machine know when someone waving their hands while they talk to a friend becomes someone trying to tell a computer to do something? Of course, when a device can watch us and interpret our movements and commands effectively, it essentially gives computers the illusion of humanity. That’s the illusion Rolston apparently is trying to create.

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Nyan Cat, if you’re not aware, is a cat made mostly of pop tart that travels endlessly through space and has spawned iOS games and countless spin-offs after first appearing on LOL-COMICS in April. It’s bizarre and adorable, and now you can see its smiling face and pink-frosted body every time you open Software Update or copy a file in Finder.

To install the Nyan Cat loading bar, just go to creator Michael Buckley’s GitHub page and follow the instructions he provides there. It takes a minute or two at most, and is easy enough to reverse. Maybe you want to surprise a loved one with some unexpected space kitty action the next time they go to see if there’s an iTunes update available, or you’re just tired of Apple’s rather plain aqua loading bar. You’ll have to supply your own background music.

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