Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.
Adaptive Path, a product development and consulting service in San Francisco, is releasing a new web interface concept called Aurora this evening. The project, which was developed in collaboration with Mozilla, is being released to the community via the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license and is available on the Mozilla and Adaptive Path websites.
Jesse James Garrett, the cofounder of Adaptive Path and the person who coined the term “Ajax,” is the lead designer for Aurora.
A video of the concept is above. People, places and things on the web are represented by objects in a three dimensional space. When users stop using objects, the objects drift off into the distance. Data objects can easily be dropped in and out of applications and communication tools are built into the UI.
Closely related objects are clustered together. As users rotate through the wheel (aka the dock) at the bottom of the page, the spacial view gives greater visual emphasis to clusters that are most closely related the object at the center of the wheel.
Aurora isn’t being productized – Adaptive Path is simply releasing the design and interface ideas into the wild as a “springboard” for an open discussion about how to evolve the user experience of the Web browser.
amusing, but these concepts are not new and have been beaten to death. “designers” love them, users hate them. even the contrived examples above are just noisy. and this fails the porn test. sorry, the last three images i downloaded are not fit to be thumbnailed on my desktop. i don’t know of anyone who wants that much of their data on display in a semi-public space
looks pretty cool. cant wait to try it out.
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can Techcrunch not stop these link spammers easily
it’s like a mashup of all of the bad “future” UI paradigms since the UI has conceptually left flatland. With a dash of Exposé and Raven Shield sprinkled in for fun. Boring.
to complicated UI with awful navigation
spatial is spelt with a t not a c.
Are these guys serious? I stopped watching 30 seconds in. All the sound effects made me have flashbacks to little clicking sounds in IE. Bad user interface concepts. Its almost like the interface equivalent of Cuil. Lots of hype, shitting realization.
..these guys will do anything for publicity.
adaptive path seems like an innovative company.
http://blabtech.blogspot.com
Not sure who this is intended for, but this looks scary and complex. Words like avalance, seizure and adrenaline come to mind.
They must have a had a very specific audience in mind (probably the company that paid for this). At the very least they could have made it look great.
What a waste of time watching this video. Not one idea worth remembering. Hope Mozilla does not listen to these guys.
Wow, what’s with all the naysaying? Is this, Slashdot? There are a ton of great concepts here. Collaboration, adding user generated content in a meaningful way, real-time communication as part of a related experience, a design that is high on interactive content.
Sure, there are some minor UI issues that stand out and the interface may appear complex for users, but how much more complex is it than a video game? And those are designed specifically so that anyone can pick up and start playing.
I totally dig it. I think if they had built this in Flash they could actually show a prototype instead of a video.
=Ryan
rstewart@adobe.com
“…but how much more complex is it than a video game?”
Isn’t that backwards thinking? Anything more complex than what it currently is would be a failure IMO.
FWIW… I hate video games, the only time I can play them is when I’m drunk with a group of friends. If we translate that requisite over to web browsing, I’d be dead of cirrhosis in a few weeks.
This is aggressively bad: in concept, design, execution and presentation. I’m hoping that the Labs didn’t pay actual money to these self-promotion clowns.
“there are some minor UI issues…”
“the interface may appear complex for users”
Nominated for the grossest understatement of the year.
I agree with Ryan, while parts of the GUI seemed clumsy and bloated, there were a lot of good ideas in there as well.
Being able to drag and drop structured data would be extremely useful. So would the built-in event notification. I’m tired of having different bubbles popping up for IM, Friendfeed, Email, RSS etc.
That blew my mind. The interface is a little “eh” but I cant wait to try it.
Very ‘ThoughtTrail’.
looks ‘Minority Report-y’
I agree. Video of Minority Report UI:
http://www.yout...h?v=NwVBzx0LMNQ
I would say it was obviously inspired by the old Apple Knowledge Navigator video
http://www.yout...h?v=8mLqJNDWx-8
If you watch it, you find what is mostly missing is the AI component. I think everyone has given up on that for now.
the sound effects took me back to Gabocorp. yuk.
Wow, that was pretty sick… in a bad way!
Hey Arrington,
Is that a screen shot of your desktop?
- This has an odd-Microsoft tech-evangelist video feel to it. Try watching the Tablet PC video propaganda.
- I’m a little worried about how nothing seemed intuitive and a lot of the visual communication assumed the person was well versed in the UI. This goes against a lot of common sense, and norms… but will be interesting to “see” once it’s live.
Innovation in making simple stuff really complex? That’s just sad
K.I.S.S. …
I agree with many of the comments above — very excited concept, but completely unusable in real world application; very unusable.
“and the person who coined the term “Ajax,””… oh just let it go already!
Geez.
Totally looks like form over function.
What’s with the cheesy futuristic UI sound effects?
Whats the crac with the mouse? Do those things really exist? Like shaking hands with C-3P0!
Funny that south park is on there. good episode choice.
Let me get this straight. They think that a collection of concepts, ideas and methods like this are protectable intellectual property that must be “licensed” under “creative commons” or some such?
So they think that, if I use the concepts, ideas and methods, I (and all my work) is in the drain whirlpool of “open source”.
No dude. It is the video that is under explicit license.
This seems more like a school project than a real effort.
Aurora looks like an OS unto itself, perhaps eventually becoming a single-purpose Aurora-box. The telcos should like Aurora because it will definitely drive bandwidth! Many excellent concepts underpinning the video.
In the future, the desktop of my computer will look like the floor of my bedroom.
And attractive women farmers who watch South Park will be “remixing” charts and graphs and listening to news podcasts on their tractors.
Riiiiight.
I don’t understand their interface.
My prediction: Smooth inline AJAX forms and popups will rule the future for some time. People are used to have things “boxy”.
Is that voice wilford brimley?
I predict user interfaces will become more and more human, but text will still play a very big part in communication. We could have the newspaper read to us, but it would just take way too long, and we’re not blind (well if you are it actually is a great idea). This is why I don’t listen to podcasts, I don’t have the time. If they have a transcripts, I browse through it and that’s it.
This fascination with graphical objects doesn’t make things easier. We are in desperate need of uncluttering the desktop, the hard drive, the social web, our bookmarks, and my office. And as long as the PC doesn’t understand all this on a human level (AI) we cannot expect it to do any cleaning up for us, because things get lost. I still lose things even though I studied computer science, frantically add tags to everything and use google desktop to find what’s long forgotten.
XML is the quintessential God of interoperability, but it still has to be mapped to actual meaning withing the context of the real world, and that’s what a computer still cannot do.
Web 2.0 and not even web 3.0 will solve this. We need actual helping assistants that understand us : Artifical Intelligence.
Some interesting ideas
so neat-o to see companies being creative shedding some light (lol) on potential future ways of experiencing the web. all i can say is… http://webpoet....ing-the-lights/