The Aurora Interface: How It Will Be?

Filed under Design, Industry, Web Design by Chad | 3 comments


Though many of you may have seen this already, I would be remiss in not showing the rest of the readers here this amazing new interface concept from Adaptive Path and The Mozilla Labs.


Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

This video was released a couple of weeks ago and represents some key concepts that are sure to come to fruition sooner rather than later. The fact that the browser serves as the primary user interface that is interacted with in the system is pretty similar to how many users are just now working with their PCs today. This trend is sure to continue with the move towards RIA and other semi connected technology. Many people simply don’t need any app that can’t be done as well or even better online than as a desktop binary app.

In addition to this basic use case, there is a significant interface advancement depicted in the video worth noting. The 3D spacial view shown is like Apple’s Time Machine but for all content, contacts and communications that have taken place in the user’s recent history. I want this now! I frequently use the “recent items” menu for apps, files, iChat conversations and server connections. The spacial view’s clustering functionality is a “stack”-like way of grouping content and other interactions by their subject matter and is so very very needed. I currently have a desktop with about 30-40 files and folders containing more content, some of them 3-4 levels deep with associated. All of these are related in some way to a project or series of otherdocuments I have in my user Documents directory… you can imagine how overgrown this gets from time to time. With a loose, time-based virtual association like this, the arbitrary location of the files is removed from your view, supplanting the need for spatial orientation with something more compatible with how your memory works.

Again, if you haven’t dug into the blog posts by the Adaptive Path team and you fancy yourself interested in UI design, you owe it to yourself to take a couple hours to read this series of posts. Is this how it will be? How far is this type of UI off in the future? Well, if you look back to Sun’s excellent StarFire concept, which I blogged about here, some things in it may never happen. It certainly doesn’t hurt to entertain the thoughts of how it could be, though.

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Posted on August 20, 2008


3 comments

  1. Anthony Handley Aug 20

    Great post. I was pretty excited about this concept when they released it. How we interact with interfaces and information is radically changing and evolving. We all need to sit up and pay attention.

    As a side note, I have to smile when a video about a future technology slips in a dig about the Cubs losing… again. ;-)

  2. Charles Oct 10

    Thanks so much for the article and video. I never thought I would say this, but I am excited about this browser. As a web designer and developer, I generally hate the idea of anyone coming out with one more browser for me to test and debug every website in, but this is revolutionary. Why couldn’t Google’s Chrome be this and even more… oh well, that is another story…

    Thanks again,
    -Charles

  1. Bookmarks about Clustering

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