Interactive Gestures: Designing Gestural Interfaces

Even though One Laptop Per Child seems to be having some serious business and political issues, apparently it hasn’t stopped them from thinking about future products. Dubbed XO-2, it is scheduled to come out in 2010.

From Laptop Magazine:

Negroponte didn’t share many details about the XO-2’s hardware, but the new system has two touch-sensitive displays. As you can see from the video and the pictures, the XO-2 will be much smaller than the original machine (half the size, according to the press release) and will have a foldable e-book form factor. “The next generation laptop should be a book,” Negroponte said.

The XO-2 will employ the dual indoor-and-sunlight displays, which was pioneered by former OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen. The design will provide a right and left page in vertical format, a hinged laptop in horizontal format, and a flat, two-screen continuous surface for use in tablet mode. “Younger children will be able to use simple keyboards to get going, and older children will be able to switch between keyboards customized for applications as well as for multiple languages,” the press release reads.

Let’s hope the UI is also revised and greatly modified for touchscreen. The current UI, “Sugar” has some issues.

Via Gizmodo.

There has been a lot of buzz lately about the holographic 3D modeling in the movie Iron Man. It’s not that far in the future, really, as Sketch Furniture shows. If they had a holographic projector, they could see what they were sketching (like we do in the video).

Technology Review article on Cubit, a $500 dollar multitouch MS Surface-like kit. (Surface is supposed to sell for about $10,000.)

Addie Wagenknecht, a fellow at Eyebeam, designed Cubit in an attempt to “demystify multitouch.” She and her collaborator Stefan Hechenberger “wanted to prove that anyone could build [a multitouch table] if they had a few simple things,” she says. In addition to making Cubit software available online, Wagenknecht is selling various do-it-yourself kits that include parts and instructions, aimed at people with a range of engineering skills. Putting together a personal multitouch table could cost anywhere from $500 to $1,000, depending on the type of hardware used, Wagenknecht says.