Part 1 of a Series
The digital home presents the consumer electronics industry with a new competitive dynamic. While it develops better and faster applications,
the CE industry must also provide consumers with engaging experiences and easy access to new content and services enabled by the Internet and
home networks. One of the most important of these applications is the user interface (UI).
In this article series, Gary Palangian and Randy Dunton of Intel’s Digital Home Innovations Team discuss the evolution of CE user interface.
In Part 2, they describe Intel’s ongoing UI research and development program, and some of the results to date.
Q. How does the emergence of new content choices in the digital home impact UI design?
Today, consumers use electronic program guides on their cable or satellite systems
to choose among hundreds of channels. Choices in the emerging digital home space
are growing, to potentially tens of thousands of content options. Traditional programmed
content will be joined by more dynamic content with on-demand availability and rich
service offerings, including home automation, media and financial management, and
fantasy sports. Distinctions between traditional broadcast media, the Internet,
and local networks will blur.
At the same time, personal content is accumulating rapidly, with expectations that
average US consumer storage will exceed 2 terabytes by 2011 (Source: TDG
Research, ‘The DNA of the Digital Home, Trends in Digital Home Storage’, 2005).
Storage systems are becoming distributed throughout the home, across the Internet,
and within increasingly popular portable electronics devices. New user interfaces
will emerge to allow users to access and manage this growing volume of media. The
underlying mechanisms on local devices, and in the distribution architecture itself,
will need to support the new usage experience, and most successful platforms will
accelerate adoption of these advanced interfaces. This trend creates opportunities
for Intel and our customers.
Q. Can you describe the evolution of CE user interfaces?
We recognize that a user interface must be well-suited to the system it controls.
The window and mouse-based PC interface we use today evolved from command-line interfaces.
Even though it was appropriate to the applications of the time, a command- line
interface would be woefully inadequate to control today’s machines.
Not so long ago, first-generation UIs let TV viewers navigate fewer than 50 channels
on a TV or set top box hooked up to a VCR. These simple UIs were utilitarian, straightforward,
and provided few options.
Now the proliferation of satellite and cable channels has led to second-generation
UIs that allow browsing and recording of 200-400 channels as well as access to some
limited services like video-on-demand. They continue to be limited to browsing,
but some basic navigation now allows the UI to deal with multiple contexts, such
as recording or searching live content, or looking at a folder of pictures, music
or other categories of media.
Q. Where are consumer electronics UIs today?
Today we are seeing the proliferation of third-generation UIs, and while they are
flashy looking, these too have their limitations. They provide limited control because
they employ fixed hierarchies of folders of content. They are essentially browsing
interfaces designed to provide access into a very large set of media and are not
adapted to individual user needs. And the remote used to control all of these devices
is still a simple browsing and selecting device that is limited to incremental stepping
in four directions.
Finally, there is the sheer number of unique UIs. Each content provider’s Web portal
typically has its own custom UI. And the digital media adapters connected to media
center devices to access libraries of music and other personal content can have
their own unique UIs. The variety of different interfaces can add to the confusion
for users.
Q. Where do we go from here?
As the connected digital home becomes a reality, we will need a new user interface
paradigm that will let us quickly navigate, search, access and manage tens of thousands
of media choices.
We call this the fourth-generation interface. It is personal and
flexible. And it breaks the rigid classification of content with integrated search
and browse, intuitive navigation, new support for input devices such as a gyro mouse.
The interface is also an aesthetically pleasing design.
Q. What will the fourth-generation interface be like?
We are now on the threshold of the fourth-generation user interface, and we already know
a lot about what its characteristics will need to be. It will be an integrated user
interface. That is, it will not involve separate portals for different content.
Users will experience the same navigation, searching and browsing, and the same
look and feel no matter what content they access. This will require content owners
and platform designers to give up the UI of a “channel” or service to a unified
user interface that provides consistency across media types and services. But it
will be required for digital home to succeed.
Q. Will the industry be able to use advanced UIs to differentiate products and services?
Absolutely. OEMs will establish branded images through the look and feel of their UIs, and platforms that support successive product refinement will have a competitive advantage.
Q. What are some of the ways the industry can use advanced UIs, and the underlying technologies, for differentiation?
Because digital home media choices are becoming so large and complex, interactive
searching and browsing will be required. And for this to work, the system will need
high quality metadata. Incidentally, here is another area where content owners and
platform creators can play, because creating very high quality and interesting metadata
can set them apart.
Platform creators can further differentiate themselves by providing the underlying
mechanics that allow powerful searching, browsing, and crisp and enjoyable visualizations
of the vast media choices.
This is an intriguing area of research because it takes us into the realm of artificial
intelligence. Some of the content recommendations provided by the fourth-generation
UI will come from social networks. My music list may be of interest to my friends.
Or I may check out some favored movie critic to see which movie I should rent. However
other people are not interested in popular media, so they may benefit from a machine-
generated recommendation.
See Part 2 of this series for more details on Intel’s fourth-generation UI research.