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RE: WIMP revisited

This might be a good time to put in a plug for IUI99.  The International 
Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. Check out the site at: 
http://www.acm.org/sigart/iui99 It looks like we have a ton of material for 
great papers already.

- Tony

-----Original Message-----
From:	Bradley J. Rhodes [SMTP:]
Sent:	Tuesday, June 02, 1998 12:34 PM
To:	
Cc:	
Subject:	Re: WIMP revisited

The mouse/pointer is definitely one of the biggest problems I have with
WIMP on wearables, but it's not the only one.  Changing the size of the
mouse cursor helps you find it (at the cost of covering useful
information), but you still need to focus your visual attention on the
screen to position the pointer.  You could also do an absolute-position
interface (e.g. a pen interface) instead of a glider like a mouse or
joystick, but that still forces you to look at the screen to find the icon
representing the command, window, or application you want to choose and
then mapping that location to your interface.

My preference is to map commands to applications directly rather than go
through the spatial metaphor at all, because wearables have an extra high
cost to perceptual overload.  It's certainly better once you've learned the
key mappings because there is a very low cognitive/perceptual load to
choose a new window.  However, there's a tradeoff -- when there are lots of
applications it becomes harder to remember all the possible commands when
there are no cues available.  Menus, while unwieldy, offer those cues at
the cost of more perceptual load.  That's why so many good desktop
interfaces offer both quick-keys and menu items -- it's a tradeoff between
speed and limited human memory.

It sounds like Thad and Steve both use X-windows, but have modified it
enough to practically be a command-key interface with extra graphics
ability.  I used X-windows for a little while, but eventually decided to
just use virtual terminals with one application per term.  A better
solution IMO would be interfaces especially designed for our particular
applications, but in the meantime we're making do with the existing desktop
infrastructures we can hack to do close to the right thing.

        -- Bradley Rhodes, MIT Wearable Computing Project

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