[projectvrm] Ambient Interface

[Peter Cranstone < >]

For those who are interested, an ambient interface should exhibit the following characteristics. BTW where are ambient interfaces useful? In the health care industry when it comes to an interface that a consumer (think demographics here) can understand. The same user interface should scale across ALL mobile devices.

1. Browserless Information should be glancable and require no navigation (I don't agree with this other than to display a picture. There has to be a menu somewhere).
2. Calm Should be seamless with the environment
3. Persistent connection Information must be current, and regularly updatable (this will eat your data plan and battery on mobile if not coded carefully)
4. Decision driven data Should be personalized and summarized to help users make decisions quickly and easily. "Should I bring an umbrella with me today?" (Context is key)
5. Private Information should be encrypted for privacy (lots of work to be done on this one)

So it could look something like this. From Phil's video.

But is that really an ambient interface? It's not a browser for sure, but it has a setting navicon in the top right hand corner and it can display an image and a menu structure via panels. But at least we're starting to fill in the blank mobile screen. However if I look at these two images below, what's the difference between them and the one above? 

Apart from A) re-arranged panels & B) one is doing everything in the browser and achieving the same user experience. So I would conclude that you can build an ambient interface using a browser - you just have to very careful about the design.

Building mobile apps is hard, building good mobile user interfaces is really hard. Here's Apple's latest iOS (it's not perfectly to scale, but it makes the point). On the left is iOS 6 and on the right is iOS 7 both are displaying the same web page. Now imagine you have to build an app for both OS's and also Android. And on top of that it has to have an 'ambient interface' - it's going to take a developer an extraordinary amount of time to support two binaries across the same platform. 

Right now Apple have 700 million users used to the screen on the left. Does anyone know what that third icon in from the right (on the right hand image) is really meant to mean? Bookmarks I get, multiple pages I get - but I have no idea what that icon is meant to mean. I guess it's meant to represent a page being sent somewhere - but then again what is wrong with the old way of doing it? 

As I said UI's are a beast to build if you don't want tech support nightmares. Just ask Microsoft which will demand yet another interface like Android. VRM has to work across everything.

Peter