Oooh… a 3D multi-touch mouse!

Engadget pointed to a video on Vimeo that shows ‘the first major step in computer interface since 1984’:

They’re referring to the introduction of the Mac user interface (almost 25 years ago). That UI was a revision of the Lisa user interface for home users. The elements that made this work were the mouse, icons and overlapping windows. They were around for many years before 1984.

The stuff in this video is the equivalent of the generic concept of a pointing device. A 3-D mouse.

There is no next generation representational abstraction, i.e. a replacement for icons. The 2.5 D interface (the 0.5D being the layers of windows on screen) is now a 3D interface.

There’s no point having a multi-touch 3D mouse unless you have better ideas for what you’ll be manipulating with it. They even had to fake automatic keying of a truck and a man from a couple of shots that were then combined in a third. Anyone who has done that kind of keying and composition knows that you need to do a lot more than point at what you want to get things done. Just because you are compositing some 2D footage in a shallow-depth 3D-space doesn’t make the job of compositing that much more intuitive.

They didn’t even use eye-parallax – if you need to collaborate with others, you still need cursors. How twentieth-century of them…