Dalle ricerche di Anand Agarawala, studente del Master in Computer Science presso l’Università di Toronto, nasce il progetto BumpTop: tentativo, ben riuscito a mio parere, di arricchire il paradigma Desktop PC – Scrivania, aggiungendo la terza dimensione e proprietà fisiche come la massa e l’attrito.
Scopo della ricerca: far sì che l’utente utilizzi lo stesso approccio sia nella realtà, sia davanti al pc, eliminando la rigidità comune agli ambienti desktop attuali. Scrive l’autore:

Despite the metaphor, current virtual desktops bear little resemblance to the look or feel of real world desktops. A workspace in the physical world typically has piles of documents, binders and other objects arranged in a way that provides considerable subtle information to the owner. For example, items are often casually placed but their spatial position and orientation are usually meaningful. Closer items can indicate urgency, and piles of items are “automatically” ordered chronologically because new items are typically placed on top. This casual organization, prevalent in the real world, differs greatly from the GUI desktop which forces users to immediately file their documents into a rigid hierarchy. Filing typically requires more effort than piling and has been shown to have other negative effects such as encouraging premature storage of low value documents, or retaining useless documents because of the effort that went into filing them.

Invito gli interessati a leggere il paper presentato lo scorso Aprile in occasione della Conference of Human Factors in Computing Systems di Montreal e a vedere il video disponibile sia in alta risoluzione (in formato MOV [117 Mb!] e WMV [98 Mb!]), sia online su YouTube.