Intui[Lab]² - Our R&D Program
Intui[Lab]² is IntuiLab’s exploratory laboratory, pursuing new and emerging natural user interaction (NUI) technologies to better enable immersive yet highly functional user experiences. We take a retail-centric perspective to both the enhancement of today’s user interfaces and to the creation of new interfaces for tomorrow, ensuring IntuiLab is always able to offer the latest generation of in-store interactive technology to its clients and partners. To achieve this goal, Intui[Lab]² has three main activities:
- Survey new trends in innovative NUI technologies and anticipate their usage,
- Experimentation and evaluation of new and emerging NUI technologies,
- Development of new NUI drivers and middleware technologies that enrich IntuiFace, IntuiLab’s NUI platform.
Themes
1. Ambient intelligence
Ambient Intelligence is a NUI system able to perceive the presence and activities of users in its environment, anticipate the goals of those users and adapt themselves to provide smart services tailored to diverse needs and requirements. By designing NUIs that are more intelligent and immersive, IntuiLab can go beyond traditional human-machine interaction (one user dictating needs to one computer through a single-user application) to interactive systems that are more attentive and responsive, providing a better user experience through smart and personalized services. One simple example is an interactive system that begins to subtly (and that word is important) advertise itself when it detects a customer nearby, guiding her/him toward products s/he may be interested in based on its knowledge of this person (gender, age, previous interactions, etc.). The following picture illustrates some very interesting (and fun!) achievements that have been presented at various technologies are being presented at technological shows. These various NUI systems (Microsoft Kinect, sensors, etc.) and the associated user experiences are now available in our IntuiFace Commerce solution.
2. Distributed interactions in surface computing
With technological progress in the field of information technology, computers are becoming finding their way into everyday objects (mobile phone, television, etc.). These new devices, endowed with computational and communication capabilities, offer great UI possibilities and challenges. Instead of interacting with a single computer, users can interact with several devices simultaneously or sequentially in their everyday life at home and at work. IntuiLab explores new tools and interaction techniques to seamlessly integrate these devices to support such user activities. These results will also empower co-located and remote cooperative work situations where two or more people work together to achieve a common goal, for example in the context of medical triage and diagnosis. IntuiLab has filed a United States Patent Application in this area.
3. Plasticity in surface computing
Behind the term “multi-touch devices”, there is a wide range of devices with different capabilities: from dual-touch devices (two contacts maximum) to true multi-touch devices (unlimited number of contacts), from small to large surfaces, with or without tangible interaction support (tags, shape recognition, etc.), with or without user detection, etc. Some differences between multi-touch devices are so significant that an application that works well and provides a great user experience on one specific device will work poorly and gives a bad user experience on another one. IntuiLab takes this technological variety into account to propose supporting tools that allow designing and developing flexible NUIs that can self adapt to different devices based on their capabilities and a set of rules specified by UX designers ensuring a pleasant and engaging user experience on every device. First results in this area are already included in IntuiFace Presentation, allowing a presentation to be portable across a wide variety of multitouch devices.
Intui[Lab]²’s activities are directly funded by IntuiLab, its customers as well as through its participation to various collaborative R&D projects. If you feel you need to foresee the future (who doesn’t?) and are interested at collaborating with or contract research to Intui[Lab]², please contact us.