It took us a while to absorb the advancement in interactions that the touch screens has brought us recently (Thank you Apple and even Microsoft) but as it seems, we are already playing with the next big thing in the interaction world, Augmented Reality.

What is Augmented Reality? Augmented reality (AR) is a field of computer research which deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data (virtual reality), where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time. ( Wikipedia )

So far, there are many beautiful experiments done with AR, and as a big fan of it, I just want to present a few videos here (If you don't know them already):

Some "Basic" Augmented Reality:

A ugmented Reality Business Cards – 2 nice videos: (From the " Reaction " Blog)

Augmented Business Card from jonas on Vimeo .

AR Business Card from James Alliban on Vimeo .

Zugara’s Augmented Reality Dressing Room : (From TechCrunch )

Augmented reality – iPhone application that helps you find your Mommy… (From Gizmodo )

iPhone 3GS Augmented Reality from Chris Hughes on Vimeo .

Augmented ID: Augmented Reality Facial Recognition for Mobile : (From ReadWriteWeb )

The future is here?

Layar Mobile Augmented Reality Browser : (From ReadWriteWeb )

Microsoft extreme augmented reality : (From Johnny Holland Magazine )

I am so! looking forward for future developments in this area, it amazing!

Mind360.com Beta was launched yesterday very quietly and I am very proud to present it here as its my brother in law brilliant startup :)

Our brain needs training to be in shape, just like our muscles, and this is why Mind360 was created, they offer a variety of games that allow you to practice and improve different cognitive aspects of your brain, and as a member you have a personal training program to improve your cognitive capabilities and strengthen your weaknesses, and do all this while playing and having fun (well not all fun, some is really hard work, but the challenges keep you going).

As described best in Mind360 home page: Brain training games aren’t just for seniors anymore. Now you can hang on to your wits by simply playing the leading scientifically based brain training games on the net. And what better way to strengthen your cognitive skills than by having a fundamentally good time as well. Today’s advanced brain training games help improve your memory, increase your ability to stay focused, plus make faster and better decisions.

As a Cognitive psychologist I am very familiar with Brain training, it was proven to work amazingly, for example on US Air Force pilots, and on US basketball players .

The best thing as I see it is the ability to get a professional automated analysis of your achievements and to see if your progress is sufficient and where to invest more time. This is truly not trivial, and part of the key to get a real improvement.

Here is an example of one of the games "Celebrity Spot" and what you can gain just by playing it.

• Cognitive exercise: Motoric Precision
• Cognitive skill trained: Eye-Hand Coordination
• Objectives: Synchronize mouse movement with click timing

Although it is just in beta and has a few bugs here and there and some of the advanced function are not up yet, it gives a great user experience. and i cant finish without saying one more thing about the design – it is just amazing, my compliments to the designer, clean, professional and beautiful design.

Keep up the good work.

Inca (2002-2009), our beloved dog, has passed away today at the age of 6.5 (and in dog years - 45).

A little bit about her: We found Inca abandoned in the streets of my home town, Beer-Sheva, when she was only at the age of 2 month. We fell in love with her immediately and decided to adopt her.

Since then she has been with us. Inca took part in all the major occasions me and my wife had - My marriage proposal, Our weeding, Birth of our sun, All of my wife's 7 years of Medical studies (It almost seemed like Inca waited for her to finish her studies and become a doctor before she left us), the adoption of our cat "Lola", (we found the cat at the age of only 3 days after her mother abandoned her, and Inca raised her), and on many many more. 

Inca sickness started due to a pancreas fever that caused a liver failure, and many more complications, in the end she died peacefully in her sleep due to a stroke. She fought bravely for survival for the last 2 weeks, but I guess it was her time to leave.

Inca was a big part of our lives, she touched us so deep with her amazing soul and spirit. To us she was like a daughter, and loosing her feels like loosing a family member. We will miss all the love and joy she gave us.

That's the most I can share at the moment without weeping... so ill just finish with: Goodbye Inca, we know you are still with us, and you will be with us forever. We hope your resting now and your smiling again.

We Love you! (Damn, I'm weeping).

A coworker in my UI department referred me a few days ago to a blog post (In Hebrew) about a small and helpful UI tool called - UIDT (User Interface designers toolkit...) . This tool was developed by "Morad Stern", a fellow UI enthusiast and a blogger (The blog is in Hebrew).

The purpose of this tool is to supply User Interface designers (Like me, or ones who do not...), with ready made UI elements. In my line of work it is very common to search for such elements in the www (world wide web...), and it can sometimes be very time consuming to find and crop the right element, and when you need to do it many times a day it can be a hassle.

UIDT is offering a simple solution for this problem (Free of charge). Still this tool is in its early stages so it doesn't have a wide variety of elements, but i'm sure that soon enough it will.

Still, I have a few suggestions that will make this tool perfect for me...

• Make this tool a social one, allow UI designers to upload elements for themselves and for others to later use. This will increase the variety and quality of the elements.
• Because I probably won't need to use the tool all day long, but I will still need it to be handy, I would suggest allowing it to work in the background, in the notification area, saving me open-close-open procedures all day long...

• Add a quick search and with auto-complete, to allow easy and quick element search
• Allow color control, especially for the background and the elements. But I don't see it as something too crucial, because most of us design on white background, and adding such control options might kill the possibility of making such a tool social.

Of course some UI design softwares already come with ready made elements, But this tool can make our life easier in so many cases, so keep up the good work "Morad" and thanks.

Few days ago i complained in my last post that Gmail is not giving a full solution to my email management needs. Well today some of these needs are filled, thanks to Gmail's multiple inboxes solution.

What is this Multiple Inboxes? Its a cool new tool that allows you to create and define additional content lists on the side, top or bottom of your current list, for example:

• your starred items
• your sent items
• all emails from a certain user

and etc... You define the content of the additional lists according to your needs.

The first thing i'm taking from this new feature is that it finally gives me a good solution for emails I want to follow up on (Until today they were buried in my very lengthy inbox), In addition it gives me the option to better spread my focus when working with my Gmail and to change it when ever my needs are changed, and they change on a weekly basis.

Another good advantage for the Multiple Inboxes is that today many users use a wide screen which support a very wide view, but still most sites are designed for 1024*768 resolution (Because it is still the best resolution for the majority of the surfers). The direct effect of it, is a lot of space not used when we are viewing web sites. Gmail decided to give these wide screen users a better use for this empty space.

And now if you could only help me set my other Gmail account inbox out there and my tasks lists (Another recent Gmail addition) i'll be even happier.

Sorry people, in the last few weeks I didn't have any spare time to dedicate to my blog. Today I found a few seconds for it :) and I wanted to present something that annoys me for a long time... Gmail.

I use Gmail email services most of the time, and I use it plenty. BUT there are a few things that really bother me, annoying as hell...

Navigating or NOvigating between emails

Reading an email in Gmail is always in a news screen and not in the inbox view. In order to view another message in my inbox I need to go back to Inbox and click on another message to view, or go to the next email from within a message,(Next or Previous one).

The problem is that for people who work with their email, they just don't read one email after the other. They scan the inbox and select which messages are relevant now. So Gmail left me with two horrible options:

1. From the inbox to a message and back to the inbox to select another one
2. From the inbox to a message and from the message to another one while marking each message I dont want to handle at the moment again as unread.

This is too much fuss...

Sorting or Searting

Gmail has a lot of shortcuts, much more than you can remember, I even took on myself a few weeks ago to gather most of the, you can read about them here. But these shortcuts the fertilize the user of the search box is time consuming and annoying. Of course Google have a very sofisticated search engine, so why not use it... but we users prefer to do the simple tasks in one click. One click to sort according to sender name, one click to sort according to attachments and etc...

By the way - when I wrote searting on this paragraph title it represents Sorting+Searching in one word.

Filtering?

Beside using all the wonderful search option inside Gmail, you can also select to flag specific messages according to their status All, None, Read, Unread, Starred, and Unstarred messages. This action checks the relevant message checkbox. But... I starred a message for a reason... How do i track all my starred messages? in order to view all my starred messages I need to visually scan all my inbox screens (currently I have more then 1000 pages) and to locate in each on the highlighted one. Sadly I can't use this quick "star" function as my "follow up" tool.

There are a lot of other small things that bother me, and a lot more things that I really enjoy in Gmail (Like the super smart "Undo" function), and I understand that to every problem I presented there are ways to overcome. But in terms of usability it lacks.

What about the competition

Last, I wanted to mention two competitive Email services Microsoft's windows live - Hotmail, and Yahoo mail. To say that both are pretty similar and due to that both offer a smart and simple outlook-like solutions for sorting, filtering, message previews and easy navigation between emails. They have their own usability problems, but as work tools they have the advantage.

So what do you use, and how will you make it better?

Browsing to see what are the new Google search experiments I saw something very disturbing... Looks like that the financial crises hits Google harder than we though, so hard that Sergey Brin himself had to take some more work responsibilities to help out the guys in these hard times :)

What I'm talking about? You can clearly see in the explanation of new Google experiment "SearchWiki with sound":

I love how Google keep a high spirit in every little thing :) Regarding the experiment itself, Sergey's special sound effects are not bad at all...

Read more about Google's Keyboards short cuts experiment and about the Accessible view experiment

I came across a game developed with and for Amnesty International, called " Pictures for truth ".

About the project: "This game was developed to support Amnesty International's campaign on China. The story and characters represented are fictional. The aim of this project is to sensitize the player to human rights violations"

About the game: "You are a journalist and photographer. A few months before the Beijing Olympic Games, your best friend, Jun Shen, a human rights defender and journalist, calls for help. You will do everything you can to help him. This adventure will take you to China where you will be confronted to many human rights violations.  By investigating, taking pictures and publishing your articles, you will work to solve the problems you encounter and eventually save your friend!"

Anyway... I played with the game for about an hour until I finished the game (Its a short game) with a score of 4000 fame points (Hurray!) and I must say that I liked it, It brought me back to the good old days of playing simple quests. But this is obviously not a game for gamers, its a very creative way to spread the amnesty agenda. And a good work doing so in this way, it really brought it to my attention.

In terms of usability the game is pretty intuitive, and I have just one main remark - It was really hard to learn how to start playing... Why?

This is the first screen you encounter after you load the game

Good idea to show me the game instruction before i play, but i kept looking and looking for the Start playing button, and couldn't find him. I just didn't know how to start the game. After a lot of air-clicking I pressed the instructions button F1 and the instruction disappeared and I could play the game. From my subjective view, this was not so intuitive... so please add a Close/Start/Play button instead of making us try and understand that this is not a pre-game screen, and just a layer of the instructions already opened...

Other than that, and on an ethic level something really bothered me

During the game you need to take pictures of "events" in order to publish articles (each article gives you more fame points). If you manage to get a better picture that shows things in different angels, for examples a bigger focus on the big bad Chinese police and in the background its prisoner, you gain more fame points then just a simple picture of both of them.

What is my problem?

• First, the game objective is to gain "Fame" points by revealing the truth and exposing the real deal. Do Amnesty people do it for the sake of fame?
• Second, the game enforces the art of taking the right picture? Do Amnesty encourage people touch up the pictures so that they will be more effective?

These things make me think a lot about the objectivity in reports, The entire conception looks a bit rotten, But the game is pretty cool, and it does deliver an important message, so go play it .

I don't know about you, but when I was a kid there was a fun game we used to play. We took a sheet of paper, and wrote a story with the entire classroom, each kid, turn by turn without even knowing what the other kids wrote about. On the sheet of paper we wrote a beginning to a story, for example "Once upon a time". We passed the paper between the participants, and each one of them (in his turn) added the next sentence to the story. The next in turn would only be able to see the last word of the sentence the previous player wrote, and he had to write the next sentence based only on that, as the only hint to the real context. Eventually when there was no room left of the sheet of paper - we revealed what everyone wrote and that was the story.

The fun part of this game is that sometimes you get a really funny and surprising short stories.

So far with nostalgic thoughts... I am trying to replicate this same game in the Twitter community, so in order to do that I opened another twitter account dedicated to that called Shtory (Shared short story) - There our story will evolve.

Game flow example:

• First sentence: 5000 years ago man kind faced a dilemma.
  • I the twitter page I will only publish the word "dilemma", this word will be the only clue for the next person to add a sentence to the story.
• Second Sentence (by a random user): dilemma. We didn't know what to do, so we decided to go to sleep.later that day
  • The twitter page will now only display the word "Sleep." (the word dilemma will no longer appear only, sleep).
• Third sentence (by another random user...): Day. Day or night it doesn't matter I'm so tired I must go to sleep, but my wife keep on nagging about the garbage.
  • and so one, you get the point (forgive me for not being too creative or imaginative here...)

Guidelines and Rules:

• In the twitter account of Shtory , you will only see one word each time. This word you see is the last word of the sentence the previous person added to the story, and based on that word you need to continue the story with your own sentence.
• Only the first sentence will be fully published from the beginning in the twitter page, the rest of the sentence will only be represented by the last word of the sentence.
• The sentence you send me, must begin with @shtory and the last word of the previous sentence (the word published on the twitter account) for example "@shtory Dilemma. we didn't know what to do..."
• Only the first sentence that I'll get as a twit reply will be added to the story, I assume that I'll get duplicate sentences per word, and there can only be one sentence to continue the story based on that word.
• Once a new sentence was written and added, a new "last word" will be published for the next sentence, so follow the account to know what is the relevant word.
• Only one twit can be sent to continue the sentence (meaning no more than 140 characters).
• Do not include links into the sentences you send.
• You can send as many twits as you want, but you can not continue a sentence you already added to the story.
• After 100 twits I will publish the full shared story.

Let the fun begin