BumpTop
Apparently I was living under a rock in June because I completely missed BumpTop make the rounds (found via this post). I was going to write off BumpTop until I realized it was a research project not a product (phew!). My initial thoughts were “this looks familiar” and “I’d never use this for my desktop.” Peter Merholz at Adaptive Path said it best: “Watching that video was like watching a literature review of interface elements from the last 15 years.” No kidding!
Alternative user interfaces using strong real world metaphors have been around the block a few times. The problem is that introducing the constraints of the real world into a virtual world can create too many arbitrary limits. Nevertheless, BumpTop is a great piece of eye candy and legitimately builds on top of a lot of great research (and I bet it’s a lot of fun to play with). I say kudos, Anand.
BumpTop took a lot of flack for being “useless”, “impractical”, etc. I bet there would have been a lot more love if it featured a better use case than file management (and if everyone realized it was exploratory research, not the latest Valley startup). Photo management is the obvious choice. Probably not good for music unless you only want to deal with albums - really the cover art is just a special case of photo management (and who cares anyway -reality is that lots of us don’t know the cover art of our new music because we buy it online or rip the CD immediately).
You could easily come up with some specialized market uses for areas with highly visual asset management. Maybe for a gallery trying to design a show? Maybe for interior design or laying out an office? Merlin Mann has some more ideas.
I feel bad that so many people dumped on the project. It accompanies a 100 page thesis. You’ve got to respect the depth of thought and effort that went in even if it doesn’t have an immediate go-to-market appeal. To read the detractors, you’d think BumpTop was about to hit the TechCrunch DeadPool. Nick Disabato says “they were trying to do something that was doomed from the get-go…” I say just the opposite - it was a grand success. The guy got his M.Sc., published a paper at CHI, and made the rounds on Slashdot, Digg, etc. Being “distressingly academic” is totally OK for an academic research project.
BTW, I initially missed that this came out of the Dynamic Graphics Project lab at U of Toronto. I spent a few months in that lab back when I was convinced that I wanted to go into HCI research. Ravin Balakrishnan was my supervisor and the man is brilliant. Looks like he was also the supervisor for BumpTop.
