2001's Dave Bowman watching his Newspad on my iPad
I picked up my iPad yesterday, fighting both the elements and a badly timed flu. While my reasons* for doing so may have as much to do with the iPad’s similarity to Arthur C. Clarke’s Newspad from 2001: A Space Odyssey, I was also quite curious about the iPad’s membrane between human and information. Many of today’s cutting-edge interactive devices are mottled with buttons, joysticks, and keyboards, but I wonder if that’s an evolutionary dead-end. Certainly, motion controllers in videogames and stylus or finger input on phones show that people are more comfortable with getting to their information when it’s more intuitive to do so. However, while entertainment and communications devices are adapting, personal computers have been locked to the keyboard and mouse for almost three decades. The iPad may seem like just a large iPod Touch, but the surprising moment for me was how natural it felt to navigate the full-size Internet, the same one you see and experience at full speed on your old computer, except this time by touch. Touch makes a huge difference. It’s effortless, so much so that I didn’t even realize I was doing it. Mousing, despite the decades of training, is still a level of abstraction between you and your information. This is new. This is something my two-year old daughter figured out (finding the album pictures she wanted to see), and something colleagues think will work for their parents. I’m very curious to see how this develops.
As you might tell, dissolving this barrier between human and information is a key point of fascination for me. Of course, there are many examples of how this might be done in the canon of science fiction. However, the interesting challenge and opportunity here is that pure information may end certain traditional dramatic scenarios, while cracking wide open new ways of presenting tension for the characters. I play with this quite a bit in Gravity, and I’m looking forward to seeing what you think of what I came up with.
Cheers,
Jamil
* Of course, the fact that it has a gorgeous e-reader and bookstore is also very interesting. Let’s see how that goes.
{ 2 comments }
the ipad is one of those things i don’t get, but might after (and if) i get one. i needed to get a cell phone before i realized why i need it. perhaps the ipad is in the same territory. or perhaps it’s really the beautifully useless toy that i imagine it is
Hey Ron! While I can say most of my gadgets aren’t for everyone, I would say this one is for more people than the rest of my gadgets. It’s the first tablet I’ve seen that works right. That’s the killer app!
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