I came across this video on the interwebs last week, and thought I would post it here. It’s Microsoft Office’s vision of the future, and how people will interact with their productivity apps. Most of it is already possible with today’s technology, albeit in a clunky hacky way. The video is more about the omni-presence of information and display technology, than it is about interfaces and user interactions. Although, it does showcase a few new interaction paradigms like touching behind the screen to interact, and flicking data between devices, or capturing it from a device (A better QRCode).

Youtube Link

The video is heavy on Augmented Reality, and 3D displays, and pretty light on new UI paradigmns or data visualization methods. If anything, it shows how slow transitions can go from cool to annoying really quick, and get in the way of productivity. Apple learnt this (thankfully quickly) and has shortened most of there UI animations to less than 0.3 seconds. Remember the time when they were too proud of the genie effect used in minimize/restore? But, they still have some long transitions in some of their Apps like iMovie (the squeeze transition for flipping the timeline and media views… Stop being too proud of it already!). You can also see them shortening the animation timings in every subsequent version of iOS. It feels “Snappier” for a reason.

Anyway, going back to the video — I wonder if microsoft hardware has some new display technology in the works that provides the illusion of thin air display. That would be pretty nifty. And hopefully it’s not something that could accidentally scorch your retina with plasma. Here’s to hoping this vision from Microsoft becomes a reality at some level, and doesn’t go the way of the Courier.