Powercursor

www.powercursor.com

In our everyday physical world touching is a very prominent sense organ. One feels whether a door is open or closed and who picks up a box knows whether its empty or stuffed. A pat on the shoulder, a little push in the back… How else is this with the interface of a computer? The objects on screen have no mass or texture, they’re not literally behind the glass of your monitor. Although the weightlessness of the graphical interface has significant benefits, touching things is as well important in communication and interactions.

Powercursor is a software toolkit in Flash that helps designing an interface that looks touchable. Imagine that you move your mouse and it sticks right onto the screen, a surface gets rougher or it handles pressure. With the powercursor program the experience of feeling can be imitated in a standard graphic interface. The technique that powercursor uses for this experience is called ‘optically simulated force feedback’. The position of the cursor will be moved when someone uses pressure on the mouse. This gives an optical illusion which gives the feeling of touching something. The uses has the imagination of feeling what he sees happening.

Occluding to inventor Koert van Mensvoort the technique can be used to make interfaces that are richer, and which feel more intuitive and recognisable. Giving the cursor just a little push in the right direction and it will end where it should be – a button or an icon - is just a simple example. Another example can be given at using an installation dialogue. When one installs new software on its computer there is always a path of steps that needs to be taken. It is an option to let de computer push the cursor to the suggested option, the user will always have the ability to ignore this power and to click on the other option. This will lead to so called persuasive interfaces, at which the computer tries to force the user to do something. It is easy to imagine that this can lead to misuse, for example when an ad banner forces you to click on its ad. Powercursor is just a complete new way to communicate in a standard graphical interface, but there still needs to be found out what works and what doesn’t.

Final Products

With the support of other digital pioneers powercursor has developed an extensive toolkit which designers can easily use in there work. The Powercursor toolkit exist by a variety of objects, like hills, put in pits, gutters, walls, buttons and rough and polished textures. Those object can be directly hauled into a Flash project. Combining them gives a complex and dynamic touchable interface. Beside that it’s possible to submit touching behaviours into existing Flash movieclips. The toolkit offers a variety of debug object, like the powergrid object, which visualises which power is at what spot.

It is within expectations that the technique can be used in a variety of applications and can even be used in the operating system. We deliberately choose for an development of the toolkit in Flash, because it gives a well enough prototyping environment to try new interfaces. We hope that the interaction designers will use Powercursor and create new interfaces with it. With this project we hope to contribute to the development of richer and graphical better interfaces. We just want to make the glass of our monitor slightly thinner.

Contact

Stichting All Media
Koert van Mensvoort
www.powercursor.com