Human-computer interaction is undergoing a revolution, entering a multimodal era that goes beyond, way beyond, the WIMP (Windows-Icons-Menus-Pointers) paradigm. Now European researchers have developed a platform to speed up that revolution.

We have the technology. So why is our primary human-computer interface (HCI) based on the 35-year-old Windows-Icons-Menus-Pointers paradigm? Voice, gestures, touch, haptics, force feedback and many other sensors or effectors exist that promise to simplify and simultaneously enhance human interaction with computers, but we are still stuck with some 100 or so keys, a mouse and sore wrists.

The EU-funded OpenInterface (OI) project took as its starting point the many interaction devices currently available – touch screens, motion sensors, speech recognisers and many others – and sought to create an open source development framework capable of quickly and simply supporting the design and development of new user interfaces by mixing and matching different types of input device and modality.

Although students appear to like the use of animations in lectures delivered using PowerPoint, there is now strong evidence that animation is nothing more than an entertaining distraction. The team points out that their study was applied only to the teaching of new concepts. It is possible that teaching a technique might work more effectively with animated, rather than static, slides. Follow-up work will investigate that possibility.

The team found a marked difference in average student performance, with those seeing the non-animated lecture performing much better in the tests than those who watched the animated lecture. Students were able to recall details of the static graphics much better. Animated slides meant to present information incrementally actually require greater concentration, which makes it harder to remember content as well as reducing overall exposure time to the "complete" slide, the researchers found.

Instead of relying on your memory, or finding a place to put all your stuff down to find a pen and paper, wouldn't it be so convenient to simply write "level 4, row H" in the air and be able to retrieve it later?

Accelerometers are the devices in phones that not only keep track of the phone's movements, but make it possible for the display screens to rotate from landscape to portrait modes depending on how the phone is rotated. These devices are always "on," so there is no additional burden on the phone to use this new application

Jansen examined more than seven million interactions from hundreds of thousands of users to analyze the click-through patterns on both sponsored and non-sponsored links. Specifically studying the rate of clicks where the sponsored and non-sponsored ads are presented together, Jansen was investigating what effect this had on consumer behavior. "I was expecting that an integrated list of sponsored and non-sponsored ads would have a higher click through on the sponsored ads," Jansen said. When the click-through rate turned out to be only 15 percent, Jansen was astounded.

for more than 35 percent of queries, there were no clicks on any result.

Web searchers are smart," Jansen said. "They have a good idea what Web ads are and how to distinguish them from other links."

What does the future hold for cellphones? We may not need to hold them at all. As phones shrink (and our hands stay the same size), features and novelty will play larger roles - in other words, they’ll get geekier, like the two-finger phone above.

replaces traditional fastenings with magnets.

Magnetic Bra’ Gives Independence Back To Disabled And Older Women

has large finger loops to make dressing easier