-
Blog
- Good example of functional gestures in Games
July 2, 2009
- Summer time!
June 29, 2009
- Movement is everything!
June 1, 2009
- Kauppa.fi and Tekninen.fi now live
May 27, 2009
- Project Snapshot: Including end-users even with tight schedules, part 2
May 26, 2009
- Redesigning Kauppa.fi
April 30, 2009
- Spin the bottle... and spin it even more!
April 21, 2009
- NexTV - tying the knot between content and technology
April 20, 2009
- Project snapshot: including end-users even with tight schedules
April 9, 2009
- Get Ready for Micro Payments
March 4, 2009
- Good example of functional gestures in Games
Surfing the Web without a Mouse
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Mobility and virtual presence can bring web usage to a whole new level. Both can be used for augmenting purposes: A mobile user can utilize his mobile device to access online content related to his current physical surroundings. Virtual presence, instead, brings the user a possibility to attend far away events, or even events lacking a physical location to speak of. In other words, the user can augment these events with his digital manifestation.
Is it justified to call the internet cyberspace? It is cyber, ok, but is it space? By space we generally mean something which has three dimensions, and various objects which can exist there. Does the internet have dimensions? Of course the servers are located all over the globe, but that is really not the point here. The point is the users, and how they experience the internet.
If we are talking about surfing the web, which for many means the same as accessing the internet in general, the user experience mainly consists of downloading two-dimensional web pages to the computer’s screen, browsing through them, and possibly taking some further actions. There really is no feeling of distance or space in typical web surfing. Well, sometimes there can be, if downloading some site takes a long time. Then the user can wonder whether the page in question comes from a server somewhere far away.
Institute for the Future’s Alex Pang has done a good job preaching about the end of cyberspace for a while now. He probably would agree with most of what I just wrote above. However, I see two current development paths, which encourage me to bring “the space back into cyberspace”. The first is mobile web. In many respects mobile web is still in its infancy. Majority of the web pages, which function perfectly fine with computers and their various browsers, can cause bad usability experiences if accessed with a mobile device. Furthermore, unlike some downloadable apps, mobile web cannot yet take good advantage of the user context, most importantly the user’s location.
We can expect to see changes in the power of mobile web in the near future, and this is interesting with regard to the notion of cyberspace. The “web-part” of mobile web, that is, digital content residing in some server, is still something where the concept of space does not fit. The “mobile part”, however, is a completely different story. Mobile users can augment real world objects with material from the web. Some applications already enable this, but more so in the future. As an example, a user can take a picture of a statue, tag it with various metadata (like ‘statue’, ‘london’, ‘man’), and send it off to Flickr. If this was the first image taken about that particular statue, it now as a consequence has more relationships than it did before. It is now related to anything tagged with ‘statue’, ‘london’, or ‘man’. This information can then be used both by stationary users, who surf Flickr searching for certain kinds of pictures, and by mobile users, who are strolling in London and wishing to access information about things spatially close to them.
The other phenomena, where the notion of space is natural, are virtual worlds such as Second Life, Habbo Hotel, and the World of Warcraft. These are completely digital applications, hence the word “virtual”, but moving around in them still makes sense. A nice thing about virtual worlds is that they can mimic the real world to a degree they wish. They typically respect it enough for the users to conceive what’s going on, but in some respects abandon the physical restrictions. This is an important factor to the success of virtual worlds; being familiar enough, but going beyond the boring restrictions such as humans’ inability to fly.
I see the web in general being influenced by both mobile web and virtual worlds, and expect this trend to further strengthen. As we know, there are already more mobile phones in the world than there are PCs, Nokia sells more cameras than traditional camera manufacturers, and so on. There is a huge opportunity in developing the mobile web. As many have said, in the future there is probably no distinction between mobile web and “the rest of the web”. I tend to partly agree: mobile web is no longer a crappy and slow subset of the web. I also disagree, because mobility can augment the web with material from the real world. In the future, mobile web will be more than the “traditional web”, not less. Finally, virtual worlds combined with mobility enable switching between the real world and the digital one. If you are too tired to walk to see your friends, or if the weather sucks, why not teleport yourself? If you are interested in the history of the city square you are visiting, why not download pictures, videos, and other content describing just that?
Santtu
[...] Read the original here: bSurfing/b the Web without a Mouse [...]
TechCrunch also wrote of this subject recently: http://tinyurl.com/6673ef