XUI: The Next Paradigm in HCI

When you look at the illustration on the left, what do you see? A young woman or an old lady?

The purpose of this blog post is to introduce you to XUI which is so weird and so out-there that it's hard to believe or even understand. Before reading on, have some fun and take a look at these two videos prepared by Microsoft as they attempt to capture the concept of XUI; the next human-computer interface.

XUI Concept Video: Home
XUI Concept Video: Work

When I first saw these videos and blogged about the concept of XUI I was, to be perfectly honest, skeptical. It seemed like so much wishful thinking. How on earth would the experiences shown in the video ever be realized in the real-world? How can you make real-world objects fly about and materialize out of think air? It was, in my opinion, interesting but far-fetched. Recently, however, I've come around to a new perspective of XUI. That it is possible that XUI will be the future of HCI. That I've been limited by the paradigm I'm currently living in.

If NUI can be designed with Magic as the metaphor, than XUI would take that metaphor to an extreme. We are not wizards playing with spells and wands as is the case with NUI, we are gods creating something from nothing.

So let me try to convince you that XUI is not only possible, but that if we allow ourselves to think outside our paradigm's box, that XUI is the next step in our symbiosis with the digital. That XUI represents the convergence of what can be imagined and what is real.

The way we perceive things depends almost entirely on what rules have been established for the world. These rules, always artificial but accepted as absolute truths, are called paradigms. Paradigms represent entire frameworks of perception and guide our understanding of the world.

Examples of old paradigms include the steadfast belief that the World was flat, or when people believed that the Sun revolved around the Earth, or when Newtonian Physics was the only theory of physics. Each of these paradigms were accepted as absolute truths and as a result they guided and simultaneously retarded our perception of the world around us. It's not until an existing paradigm is shattered - shown not to be absolute - that we can move on to bigger and better things.

So what does this have to do with XUI? Everything. In an interview with Robert X. Cringely, Douglas Engelbert - the guy who invented the computer mouse and was key to the development of graphical user interface, word processing, and hypertext - reveals how his quest to create computer systems of today was met with scorn from leading computer scientists throughout the 50's and most of the 60's. Engelbert, the guy who is rightfully thought of as the father of personal computing, was ignored and even ostracized for the first 20 years of his career. Why? Because he was proposing a new paradigm in computing; Personal computing.

In the interview with Cringely, Engelbert talks about the problem of overcoming paradigms of thinking and how personal computing really represented a completely new paradigm. It's a thrilling interview for Engelbert groupies like myself, but it may prove way too boring for anyone else. At any rate, that interview got me to thinking about NUI and especially about XUI.

What is XUI? XUI is a term that was invented (I think) by Dennis Wixon of Microsoft. It's a big step beyond NUI; a big step beyond what we think of as human-computer interaction today. It is, in effect, a new paradigm.

The movement from Command Line Interface (CLI) to Graphical User Interface (GUI) to Natural User Interface (NUI) are sometimes described as paradigm shifts, but I think the real paradigm shift was Engelbert's vision of augmented intelligence as realized in the personal computer. The evolution from CLI to GUI to NUI is an evolution, not a paradigm shift. XUI, on the other hand, is a paradigm shift. It's something so alien to our way of thinking that its seems absurd.

So if you are able to suspend disbelief rooted in our current paradigm, does that mean you can realize XUI today? No. Probably not. The reason is that our technological capabilities have not yet to catch up with the XUI paradigm.

When Englebert imagined the possibility of personal computing it was all he could have done at that point. There were, by his recollection, only three computers in the entire United States at that time all of which were huge. It took time for technology to catch up with our current paradigm but today we have computers that can fit in your hand that are more powerful than all three of those huge computers of the 50's. If you had told the guys that put together ENIAC in the mid 40's that the computational power they were developing would be easily contained in a device the size of marble 60 years later, they would have laughed you out the room. Not only was that simply unimaginable it was technically impossible at the time.

XUI is not technically possible today. The best we can do is NUI, but in designing NUI we should always strive for the next paradigm. We should not retard our own potential and ignore XUI researchers only because their ideas don't fit into the paradigm in which our minds are captive. Think beyond what seems possible. XUI is a bit out of reach today, but its not unreachable.