Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

I recently came back from a quick trip to Pittsburgh (from Seattle) to see Randy Pausch's last lecture at Carnegie Mellon University (my PhD alma mater). Millions of people have now watched Randy's last public talk, "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams." It is expected that Randy will pass away sometime in the next few or several months (hopefully many months) due to terminal pancreatic cancer.

Given the seriousness of Randy's situation, it was definitely worth the travel and the impact on an important paper deadline the next day.

Randy has been an important contributor in my field, human-computer interaction, over the last 15 years. He has been a mentor to me and also an example of how to have great positive impact on the world. I went to pay my respects to Randy while he was still alive and I came away inspired in several ways:

• Inspired to keep working hard at my teaching. Randy reminded me why I became a professor.
• Inspired to continue to work on creative research projects and invent the future. Randy's success with Alice shows that you can create tools that make a difference in unleashing the creativity of people who may not have the arbitrary technical background that current technology requires.
• Inspired to keep those first two activities in perspective with respect to the importance of my family and friends. Being a professor at a top rank department can be a lot of work, but in the end it is your family and friends that are really important. I have to admit that at times I do not find a great life-work balance and Randy's talk reminded me of the importance of finding this balance.

If you haven't seen Randy's talk yet, I recommend you watch the video on the Carnegie Mellon University site. You will be impressed. It is worth your time.

Thanks Randy!

James

Doug Engelbart's Bootstrap Institute

I always felt that one of the reasons that Doug Engelbart's ideas took 20-30 years to hit the mainstream was his lack of communications skills. How could anyone who saw the 1968 demo of the NLS system not go run out and try to change the world with this new technology? Although Engelbart is a genius, I felt the talk he gave at CHI '98 was rambling and hard to follow. I have seen him speak two or three times about the Bootstrap Institute and it never makes much sense to me. But, given how hard it was to get people to quickly understand his great innovations of the 60s, I fear that I'm simply missing it. I think I need to devote a graduate seminar to studying Doug's early work and then studying his recent work from the Bootstrap Institute in detail. Who would want to participate?

Why no pen-centric UIs?

Microsoft has released an updated version of the TabletPC OS in the latest Windows XP SP2 (it is downloadable now if you want to try it out). The major change you can see for the TabletPC is the improvement of the TIP (Text Input Panel). This is better, but hardly a radical improvement to the UI.

At a recent TabletPC workshop put on by Microsoft and the University of Washington, many researchers complained about Microsoft refusing to release a pen-centric UI for the TabletPC. Instead they have relied on a UI that is simply incremental over the existing desktop UI. The pen is little more than a mouse pointer in the existing GUI. The TIP is just one such example of a hack that is necessary to let the pen input text into existing applications without the apps having to know anything about it.

The reason Microsoft has given for this decision to many of us privately in the past is that they actually did develop a purely pen-centric UI and it tested quite well. The problem was that people either said or exhibited problems when moving between that novel UI and their existing GUI apps, which they would still have to do in the future. This feels like a bad compromise or a great research problem.

How do you allow someone to learn an entirely new UI that takes advantage of the unique input characteristics of the TabletPC platform, yet still allow them to easily use their existing GUI metaphor when it is more appropriate or necessary? Can you make this new UI easy to learn and allow it to become more pen-centric as the user gets more expertise? Think about how Marking Menus start out as a simple pie menu (a fairly traditional GUI interaction -- except for the circular part) and then moves to a gestural interface as the user become more expert with it. You could push this research even further if you consider multimodal UIs that use pen, gesture, and speech rather than just pens.

What should Microsoft do? What is the interesting research here for those of us who want to push harder? What do you think?