CES 2016: From the Fringes

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is the premier trade show for tech product previews and release announcements, going as far back as the VCR in 1970 to Driverless Cars in 2013*. This year the CES featured about 3800 exhibitors, spanning 2.47 million sq. ft. spread out over 3 locations** visited by 170,000 media and industry professionals — and I was privileged to count myself amongst them. Featuring keynote addresses from Intel, Netflix, IBM, Samsung, nVidia, Volkswagen and other big names, a lot has been written, presented and shared on mainstream as well as social media about the 4 day event. This chart sums it up the hype pretty well:

Source: BuzzRadar, CTA

I decided to share some of my views from the fringes, rather than the trenches — there is no point in rinsing and repeating what is already out there, nor do I have any delusions about the value of my personal opinion about tech that enables your car to count how many oranges are left in your fridge (yes, it was demoed, with voice control).

The Oculus Rift demo was by far the hardest to get into — there was a line, a line to get in the line, and a third holding area. Eventually I made it on the last day, and it took me about 20 min to recover from the simulator sickness caused by piloting EVE Valkyrie’s spacecraft from a living room chair. I still felt there were rough edges and the HTC Vive was by far a more refined, immersive and truly flawless experience. The new Sony PlayStation 4 VR was quite impressive as well: I could lean out of a moving car and look behind me, and the granularity of control was so good I could rotate knobs on the car stereo. OSVR.org based devices were quite popular too, and some others that caught my eye were Virtuix Omni active VR platform, AntVR’s Holodeck concept and ICAROS‘ EUR 10,000 gym equipment that lets you fly around in a virtual world powered by your own body. Certainly beats playing first person shooters wearing VR googles on a treadmill, or riding a virtual horse on a exercycle.

There were tons of clones (mostly based on Gear VR) and drones. Augmented Reality seems to be gaining ground, but despite solutions like the Sony SmartEyeglass and Daqri Smart Helmet, VR seems to be more popular of the two. It’s worth noting that virtually every VR or AR demo was running on Unity3D content, including those at NASA and IEEE’s booths.

I also tried my hand at racing simulators of various scales: from small VR setups, to actual cars mounted on motion platforms, to a massive 4×4 grid of 55″ OLEDs in front of a force feedback seat rig. There were several interesting display technologies on show: 3D without glasses, transparent (scaling up to entire walls), curved and Samsung’s modular, edge-blending display tech straight out of a sci-fi movie. Avegant’s Glyph might turn the display industry on it’s head, though, much like the way it’s worn.

 

On the automotive side, voice, gesture and intent based user interfaces seem to be gaining ground. Also making an appearance were adaptive user interfaces and improvements in sensor fusion, self-learning and self-driving techniques. There were tons of wearables, 3D printing and home automation booths. The two core themes seemed to be a maturing of the ecosystem (just about everything built on top of something else, not too many technologies solving problems from scratch) and apps for doing things that don’t need apps, like locking your front door. You’d think we would stop there, but no:

On the social innovation side, I found GrandPad, Casio’s 2.5D printing and the Genworth R70i Aging Experience very thoughtful. Besides these, I liked Mixfader‘s idea of an MVP slider for mobile DJs: after all, the crossfader is the main thing that requires precise tactile control, everything else can be relegated to the screen. Also impressive was Sony’s line of 409,600 ISO see-completely-in-the-dark cameras. And this is now a thing:

You’d also probably be able to find a lot of beautiful photos of Las Vegas on the Internet, so let me leave you with this video of a not-so-common Las Vegas activity that I squeezed in on the last day, courtesy of DreamRacing.com (very fringe-y because I picked a Nissan over a Ferrari). Thanks for reading!

* Apple, Google and Microsoft have their own tech events and despite the Xbox (2001) and Android devices (2010) being unveiled at CES, these companies tend to keep their product announcements exclusive to their own events. So no Hololens at CES.

** „Tech East (Las Vegas Convention Center), Tech West (Sands/Expo at the Venetian,  The Palazzo, Wynn and Encore) and Tech South (Aria and Vdara)

Amuse UX Conference, Budapest

Last week, I had the privilege of being part of a group attending the first edition of AmuseConf on behalf of our company. Amuse is “an international conference for anyone interested in how to design and develop successful products that users love”. It’s organized by the same good folks that bring us the outstanding CraftConf year after year, sponsored primarily by Prezi and UStream (and SAP in case of Amuse). They did a near-perfect job, with only minor glitches with the seating and catering on the first day. Considering that the Big Data oriented CrunchConf was also literally next door, the event was practically flawless. Fast, uninterrupted WiFi and no food options for vegetarians/vegans remained a hallmark this organizing team (even though Tom Illmensee, event MC is himself vegetarian 😉 ).

(BTW, if you’re wondering why so many tech conferences are being hosted in Budapest, the event’s WiFi password should give you a hint):

510 attendees from 32 countries (as far away as Australia) made Amuse a roaring success, as did its impressive lineup of Speakers. 27% of the speakers were women, which is great for a tech conference — I hope next year we have even more!

Below is a summary of the talks I found the most relevant to my work. But by no means does that mean you should skip the other talks… depending on where you are and what you’re doing, you might be interested in some of the eclectic topics covered such as:

• Designing web interfaces for children by Trine Falbe
• Conducting research outside “sample of convenience” by Bill Selman from Mozilla Foundation
• Design Thinking by Tobias Haug of SAP (my favorite quote: “Innovation = Execution x Creativity”)
• How to get your dream UX job by Andrew Doherty of Google (worth checking out just for his mad presentation skills)
• The Ethical Designer by Cennydd Bowles
• Storytelling in a multidevice landscape by Anna Dahlstrom

Design Equilibrium

By Jonathan Lupo

Jonathan opened the conference with a very engaging talk drawing parallels between businesses and ecosystems: a “balanced exchange of value between Actors, Enterprise and Brand”. He gave practical examples citing the application of Lynn Shostack’s work on Service Blueprinting to a transformation in the healthcare industry. I strongly encourage viewing his inspiring talk on YouTube.

His core suggestion is a separation of Product Design from Service Design. The latter “fills in whitespaces between points of [rich] engagement provided by products”, helping to restore balance to the overall experience, and hence the business ecosystem. This is the real intangible value of services, as opposed to products.

He also proposed the concept of an “Engagement Model”: a framework to contextualize all the data a business collects.

UX: Design as a Science

By Joel Marsh, author of the UX Crash Course

Joel’s key message was that “Scientific UX Design is reproducible”: essentially drawing on the principles of the Lean Startup and applying them to the UX domain. His presentation was one of the most popular and engaging ones, and his quotes and examples garnered a lot tons of positive feedback. One thing that struck me was his exposition on the two types of creativity: Creative expression and creative problem solving. He noted that an over-applicability of creative expression can make you feel good as a designer, but result in an over-designed and bloated product:

Another talk I would highly recommend watching when it comes out on UStream.tv.

Making Dog Food a Part of Your Balanced Diet

By Toby Sterrett

Toby used his work at Simple Bank to highlight the pros and cons of “eating your own dogfood”. The initial employees used the app themselves, and one of the downsides was that the missed revelation that users of such a smooth app had to deal with a paper form-based process to close their account, which took up to 20 days.

Another inspiring talk that you should definitely check out, full of quotes of wisdom like:

• “Delight is design’s superpower”
• A past discussion on Leadership strategy: “Build a shared vision, get the **** out of the way”
• “UX is not about throwing technology at a problem, but throwing people at a problem”

On the other hand, Simple A/B tested as many as 16 variations of their login page (for more examples, check out UserOnboard.com).

Live posters being created by @remarker_eu

How We Built Hotjar and Onboarded 50k Users in a Year

By Dr. David Darmanin

David used practical examples from Hotjar to support his model of “Drivers, Barriers and Hooks” when dealing with site visitors. He also put a quirky twist on some timeless wisdom:

MVP is the smallest possible product you need for your customers to tell you that it sucks #ux #lean #amuseconf

— Kartik Sachdev (@survivalcrziest) October 29, 2015

Hire people smarter than you. It's intimidating but you'll learn something & in the end they'll make you look good #ux #amuseconf

— Kartik Sachdev (@survivalcrziest) October 29, 2015

The two most amazing insights for me were:

• Hotjar captures every single customer interaction on a Trello board, and uses that feedback to prioritize their features.
  • They also make their roadmap public, which demonstrates their commitment and at the same time reduces enquiries about feature requests
• They use the income from their paid customers to fund the creative freedom to build features for their free customers

The Invisible Interface: Designing the Screenless Experience

By Avi Itzkovich

Avi, founder of UXSalon, opened with a discourse on recent editions of Microsoft Productivity Future Vision. From there he led the discussion on towards a future without bigger and wider screens (which wouldn’t require “superhuman arm strength”):

• “The most profound technologies are the ones that become invisible” 
  • Like automatically opening sliding doors
• “Voice UI is the future”
• “Gesture control is here to stay, but not on screens”

The Best Interface is No Interface

By Golden Krishna

Golden surmised that we are all “chipping away at digital chores”, and we don’t have to be “slaves to screens”. He has laid the foundations of the #NoUI movement with his book: “The Best Interface is No Interface”. His excellent talk (slides here) was supported by book reading and real examples. Also, don’t forget to check out his accompanying toolkit on “how to create elegant solutions with no screens”.

For further inspiration to join the movement,  take a look at his Producthunt collection of “interfaces that require little or no time with screens”.

Magical UX and the Internet of Things

By Josh Clark

Josh opened with an announcement of his book release: “Designing for Touch”. His presentation was literally magical, complete with a wand, to the point that he managed to tie in together excerpts from preceding talks and put the whole conference in perspective. I found a similar slidedeck from one of his previous talks here, and I highly recommend taking a look at it while we wait for the official conference videos to come up on Ustream.tv. It was a treasure trove of out-of-the box examples like:

•  Augmented REality Sandtable (ARES), which literally turns dirt into a high-tech, military-grade user interface… using not much more than a Kinect and projector
• Grab Magic, which brings superpowers to data transfer
• Propeller Health, which connects Asthma inhalers to phones for health monitoring

Josh’s key message was “interaction at the point of inspiration”: that we should think of “the whole world is an interface, just like it has always been”. He proposed “thereables” instead of wearables: bits of smart technology in the physical space where we would expect to interact with them, not something we burden ourselves by carrying or wearing all day long. To this end, he suggested that “the smartphone is Magic Wand 1.0 for everyone” and we should start thinking of it as just more than a screen.

Regarding user interfaces, he had 3 bits of advice that I found remarkable:

• “Technology should amplify our humanity”
• “We shouldn’t educate users on how technology works, unless we really *have* to”
• “Honor intention, don’t assume it”

Josh ended with a call to action:

We have bigger problems to solve. @bigmediumjosh #amuseconf #ux #innovation

— Kartik Sachdev (@survivalcrziest) October 30, 2015

Like this one.

 

 

 

 

 

This is a Revolution, Not a Recession

“In human history, there have been three great technological revolutions and many smaller ones.  The three great ones are the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and the one we are now in the middle of—the software revolution. […] It appears that the software revolution will do what technology usually does—create wealth but destroy jobs.”

– Sam Altman, “The Software Revolution”

A lot has been said and written about the great recession, the rise of the robot economy and the loss of jobs (or the creation of them in the new sharing economy – nobody is really sure yet). Let’s take a step back and get some perspective:

“Coming out the recession” and “Economic recovery”

What I think those people (and governments) who say this don’t realize is, that the jobs that were destroyed in the recession, are not going to come back. Because just like individuals, businesses too found ways of making ends meet during the hard times. This surge in demand for more cost effective labor was met by increased automation. And jobs that were automated then are not likely to come back now.

On the other hand, for decades science fiction movies and books have painted a promising picture of a utopian future where machines would do all the work and we humans would engage ourselves in higher pursuits. Yet, here we are, wanting to get our jobs back from the machines.

At the same time, we are heading towards a global workforce crisis by 2030.

Something doesn’t add up.

The Dignity of Wage

Maybe the answer is in what I call “the dignity of wage”. It’s the same reason why people are driven to crime. Our modern economy is robbing people of the opportunities to make money, while at the same time the media constantly bombards them with the notion of spending it. I believe many of the prisoners (who, by the way, in some places outnumber students) would be willing to mend their ways, if only society would give them a fair chance at earning a decent living for themselves and their families. People need something to do, to give meaning to their lives.

Especially in a society and value system in which the education and value system is so heavily employability oriented.

Maybe it’s time for a political debate on Basic Income.

“Humans will be able to move up to more ‘creative’ jobs…”

“…while machines will do the more routine ones”. The problem with creativity is, it’s not for everyone. Neither are tech jobs. Both require a certain mindset that takes years of training to master. Finally, “higher” creative jobs are only relative to “lower” mundane jobs. If all jobs became equally creative, people would have nothing to aspire to. We will be back to square one. For example, The Netherlands’s success is based on acknowledging this distinction.

Automation or Population: Pick One

There are some other longer-term issues with our current employment scenario. Life on this planet is heavily dependent on two things: oil, which we are rapidly running out of, and electricity, which, if disrupted, could instantly send us back to the stone age. Collectively as a civilization, we are not very well prepared for large-scale change.

This planet is currently on an unsustainable trajectory. And automation is only unbalancing our society more. In order to ensure continued “dignity of wage” we need to either limit automation, or limit our population. The reason is that automation is that it can transcend international borders without a visa, but human beings can not.

Sometimes this leads to strange side effects. When I was in Bangalore, the parking lot at my office had a security guard who would flag you down while entering and note down the vehicle’s registration number. Years later, someone decided it would be a good idea to install an automated parking gate, as seen around Europe and North America. I’m not sure what they were thinking, but then we had 3 security guards instead of one: one to press the button on the gate since it was installed too high up to be reachable by drivers of average Indian height in average Indian cars, one to make a manual note in the register as a back up, and a third to supervise over the first two.

Which brings me to the next point: Any transaction that involves a human being is inherently potentially flawed. No amount of automation will make our world perfect or optimal, as long as it’s still “our world”.

“Creating Jobs”

The tobacco industry employs more than a 100 million people worldwide. If we want to create more jobs, we should all smoke more cigarettes. By extension, conflict has traditionally been the biggest source of employment: In research, manufacturing, exports, destroying settlements, and providing private security while rebuilding them. As a Green Beret recently pointed out, in today’s job market a Special Forces training is better than an MBA.

So there you have it, the solution to all our economic problems is perpetual war.

Or we can take inspiration from a bunch of African kids, and grin and share it. In other words, a Resource Based Economy instead of an Employment Based Economy.

Endnote: You really should read the link about the rise of the robot economy.

Update 2015-05-25: More food for thought: Self-Driving Trucks Are Going to Hit Us Like a Human-Driven Truck

Why Driverless Cars?

Image Courtesy: Ludie Cochrane, Flickr

In case you’re late to the party, it all started with the DARPA Grand Challenge more than 10 years ago. Then Google got serious about it. Then Audi. And Audi on a racetrack. How could BMW be left behind? Then Tesla brought autopilot to it’s cars. And Apple decided to improve the experience of accelerated transportation. While Volvo decided to converge the phone and the car. And others attempt to use smartphones to augment the automobile’s current capabilities.

Meanwhile, other advancements were happening, too. Inertial navigation from Jemba. Shape-shifting cars from BMW. Augmented Reality in cars. And in Supercars. The convergence of video games and race cars, which started with instrument cluster design in the Nissan GT-R. Analytics in race cars. Infrastructural innovations, outside the car itself. Convoys of robot trucks in war zones. And some others that didn’t do so well.

There is also talk of remotely driven cars from Ford. Although clearly the poor level of software quality we have come to terms with on our desktops needs to be addressed before we scale it up to our cars. Maybe open source cars will come to the rescue.

Impact on jobs and economy aside, there are some fundamental problems with this whole “autonomous vehicle” thinking. Allow me to point out the elephant behind the SUV in the room:

• #1: Cleaner, greener energy is a much more serious problem to solve than eliminating monotony, fatigue and accidents
  • The personalized mechanical transport apparatus is nearly 130 years old in more or less its current form
  • Internal Combustion Engines are some of the most inefficient feats of engineering. Modern petrol (gasoline) engines have an efficiency of about 15%, compared to 80% for recent electric vehicles
  • The average lifetime of a car is 7 years. After that, as much as 86% of it can be potentially recycled. But most of it just accumulates in piles of junk.
• #2: The 21st century problem is not with drivers or cars, it is with the infrastructure
  • Take a deep breath and internalize the fact that cars and robust cities are fundamentally incompatible
  • Ask anyone who has driven in an Asian city, like Bangalore, where citizens spend (lose) US $ 6.5 billion of person-hours annually just sitting around in traffic. A problem that the US $ 1,600 “affordable mobility” car would have only made worse, had it actually succeeded
  • One could argue that driverless cars could eliminate this inefficiency by enabling people to work while the cars drive (erm, sit around in traffic) by themselves. But if we are able to achieve that level of telecommuting, then why not “eliminate the middlecar” and not commute at all?
  • There are cheaper, equally innovative solutions to make driving safer, which don’t involve eliminating the driver and making the car more expensive
• #3: Driverless cars still need to be sturdy enough to support human life
  • It makes sense to make aircraft unmanned (whether for war, commercial or humanitarian purposes), because an aircraft without a human being in it can be lighter, cheaper and more efficient (it doesn’t need windows and safety equipment, for example). Contrary to this, passenger cars, regardless of whether they are driverless or not, will always need to carry the same level of safety and comfort equipment (maybe even more) as they do now. So making a car driverless in a sense just makes it more expensive.
  • Already, about half of the cost of a modern car is software, lest you be tempted into thinking that adding more software will make cars cheaper
• #4: A chain is only as strong as its weakest link
  • As long as software is written by humans, there can and will be disastrous and potentially fatal mistakes. Not too long ago, the good folks who write software that puts shuttles in space acknowledged that we are still in the “hunter-gatherer stage” of software development. Although we have made advancements in leaps, there is still a lot we don’t yet fully understand.
  • Airline pilots have been dealing with a dangerous phenomenon known as automation dependence for years. It’s a problem we don’t have on our roads… yet.
• #5: We don’t really need cars any more
  • At least not in our cities. Even though we’re driving less, there are more of us driving. And more of us driving even bigger cars than ever before. But what are the use cases?
    • Commuting to and from work? At approximately the same time every day? With tens of thousands of other people like you? To approximately the same physical location? Sounds like a classic opportunity for optimization. How about jumping into a more efficient mass transit vehicle with all the others?
    • Public transport not clean or safe enough? It would cost a fraction of the money to improve and optimize our public transport systems, compared to what it would cost to spam the planet with billions of driverless cars
    • Going shopping? Running errands? Consume less, walk (or bicycle) more and support your local grocery shop 🙂
    • Going out after work? You can’t drink and drive, anyway!
  • The only reason we need cars any more are for inter-city travel, emergencies, last mile connectivity and motor sports (because no one wants to see a bunch of algorithms racing each other). We need to fix our infrastructure and our way of life, not our cars.
  • Peak Car. It’s a thing.
• #6: We are reinventing the wheel. Literally.
  • Given the problem statement that driverless car manufacturers have set out to solve, wouldn’t it make more sense to make cars that can fly themselves, rather than be constrained to the limits of 2 dimensional roads? After all, that’s already a solved problem.

Update 2015-05-25: More food for thought: Self-Driving Trucks Are Going to Hit Us Like a Human-Driven Truck

Q: Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality? A: Augmented Reality

Let me kick off these sections on Augmented Reality & Technology Trends with a mention of Christopher Mims’ recent post over at [MIT] TechnologyReview.com:

So what was it, really, that kept us from getting to Virtual Reality?

For one thing, we moved the goal posts – now it’s all about augmented reality, in which the virtual is laid over the real. Now you have a whole new set of problems

It will be worth your time reading his entire analysis of the question. Meanwhile, interesting things have been happening in the Augmented Reality (AR) field. First, it was Pranav Mistry from the MIT Media Lab demonstrating a cheap, adaptable and wearable gestural interface, aptly called SixthSense. Watch the TED Video from November 2009 here.

Then in 2010, marketers started experimenting with adding AR layers into the real world, making use of software such as the Layar platform for mobile phones. You can watch a convincing demo here. I say convincing because mobile phones are the most likely candidate for widespread adoption of AR technologies. Because if they were not, we would have more devices like the Wrap 920AR from Vuzix, which are basically wraparound goggles that provide an immersive AR experience.

The Video Game industry is always quick to adopt new interfaces (and often invents them),  and AR is no exception. Motus from the University of Abertay Dundee uses a Sixense TrueMotion controller (I couldn’t find any relation to SixthSense) to manipulate a virtual camera in a virtual environment, with applications in gaming, animation and simulation. It was originally inspired by the Simul-Cam that finally enabled James Cameron’s 20-year old dream to come to life, in the form of the 2009 movie Avatar. Ironic, a movie about remotely controlled humanoids, filmed using AR cameras.

Speaking of Avatar, not only was the technology behind it futuristic, but so was the marketing, which used an i-TAG system that allowed the manipulation of an on-screen 3D model, using a Webcam that scanned interactions with a tag in the physical world. Also, the same idea of controlling remote representative agents is explored in a different form in the 2009 movie, Surrogates, which IMHO was more “epic” than Avatar.

So the next question is: When will we reach the point when we won’t be able to tell the difference between what is “augmented” and what is “real”? Or would we rather not be able to?

Simulating The Entire World

When Nick Bostrom suggested that we humans might already be living in a computer simulation, he probably didn’t see this coming.

Dirk Helbing at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology has proposed a computer simulation of the entire planet, using real-time economic, environmental and health data. That’s right. A mega-simulation of everything (well, almost). The FuturICT Proposal explains how we know more about the universe than ourselves, and why it’s a good idea to collect massive amounts of data and use it to simulate the behavior of entire economies, in order to predict and prevent crises (such as ecomic bubbles and regime shifts).

At the other end of the spectrum, but not too far away at the other Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, since 2005, researchers are working on the Blue Brain Project, which aims to be “the first comprehensive attempt to reverse-engineer the mammalian brain, in order to understand brain function and dysfunction through detailed simulations.”

And oh, by the way, the World Wide Web also has its roots in Switzerland. Coincidence?

Next World

I haven’t done this in a while: Here’s a new section exploring what lies for humanity in the future. Original inspiration: Discovery’s TV show of the same name.

It will probably turn out to be quite closely related to Sanity Check.

Forget UAVs, The OPVs Are Coming

Imagine a behind-enemy-lines rescue operation where a pilot-less aircraft penetrates enemy territory, wreaks havoc (or not), picks up some friendlies, and lo! The helicopter now has a crew to fly it around, make their escape, wreak more havoc, penetrate deeper into enemy territory, any or all of the above. Kinda like KITT returning to Michael Knight, isn’t it?

As technology increasingly shrinks the gap between science and science fiction, the US Army estimates that half of its aircraft will be OPV, Optionally Piloted Vehicles. And here’s the clincher: this is their estimate for the next 15 years. In other words, OPVs are already here.

And you thought Skynet’s electronically waged real war was unbelievable.

(On the brighter side, it may not be Skynet that wages the war, it could just be some Iraqi militants using a $26 shareware program.)