See New, Hear New, Feel New – Nseries – Our Next Sense – Gesture UI (+iPhone 4 in 2009 Nokia vid?)

Whilst I was looking at the Nokia N9 / N950 teaser, I thought it would be interesting to look at all the parts of the ad where the device wasn’t shown.

As mentioned by a few people in comments, it does hark back a little bit to classic Nseries days.

There’s even the classic mantra of See New, Hear New, Feel new, with great emphasis on gestures. You’ll see this played through out every scene, and you’ll see the squircle shaped icon in many places beyond simply being on the app menu (though I haven’t captured that as much).

The video cuts off abruptly so I don’t know what else there was to come. It’s a very interesting reel:

Touch, gesture, see, hear, feel, gestures, bloom/nature/natural gestures, movement (notice the spinning circle – what gesture might that activate?), people, people, people, people together, connected people, Jessie’s girl? :p

They could mean a lot more, or they could mean nothing at all.

I’m not sure if there’s a lot of weight on this but ninja/smith seems to think that N9 might have actual air gestures. Nokia’s patented something of this nature back in 2008. In an interesting post yesterday when Nokia Conversations responded to the leaked teaser (as well as points about innovations and future devices) they said:

“An innovation in interface design will make our interactions quicker, more natural or simpler – and so offer users value through the time and effort they save.

At the moment, of course, our technology is far from natural. There’s nothing natural about icons and drop-down lists and tickboxes. It would probably be better if you could just swipe through your apps, wouldn’t it?

So one of the things that our engineers are up to is making technology disappear. How we then control our devices is the tricky part: with possibilities like gestural control, contextual choices and – who knows? – thought projection – all up for possible consideration.”

I go back to this often as it offers a lot of insight; Nokia mentioned back in December

• Touch screen immersive experiences, users have head down, pinching and zooming – touch screen requires full attention.
• I think we’re missing a trick. Need to bring people’s head back up, maintain eye contact with better one handed use, better ways to use devices without them commanding our full attention

via electronista

Now it might be thinking too much into this. The gestures might still all be touch based, just an expansion of touch gestures. Then again, it could all be actual air/visual gestures not requiring touch. A little Kinect like you might add but instead of camera and infra red using ultrasonic transducers.

Check out this video from Nokia Conversations two years ago. Again they talk about gestures, NATURAL gestures, that sixth sense.

Also pretty interesting are the iPhone 4 in black and white. In 2009 :p

This does seem to align more with the whole “innovation” angle Nokia conversations recently emphasised. Innovations not just something new but offering NEW value.

If we’re going all out with stringing all bits of information – instead of hand gestures, what about iris tracking? lol @PoliticsPenguin mentioned that on twitter – that would probably be very very difficult to achieve but would be another interesting implementation all together. Though might be a little too far into the future.

Category: Nokia