BumpTop: Rethink Your Desktop
By Jeffrey | September 25, 2007
The desk you’re sitting at right now has one thing in common with almost every computer desk in the world: it’s probably a mess, with papers scattered everywhere, random objects spread around, with a computer sitting somewhere near the middle.
Although it may not seem like it, this is actually a highly efficient organizational structure, at least according to University of Toronto graduate student Anand Agarawala.
And not because it makes it look like you’re actually working.
In BumpTop, software being created by Agarawala, documents on your computer are arranged by three-dimensional boxes lying on a virtual desk. You can flip through them, stack them, bunch them up, crinkle and throw them away, and pretty much anything else you could do with papers on a real desk.
The user can position the boxes on the desk using the stylus or mouse. Extensive use of physics effects like bumping and tossing is applied to documents when they interact, for a more realistic experience. Boxes can be stacked with well-defined stylus gestures. Multiple selection is performed by means of a Lasso Menu, which fluidly combines into a single stroke the act of lasso selection and action invocation via pie menus.
Watch a preview video to see how this all works:
It is being designed to work with most modern computers. Yes, most. Which means it will not be limited to a single operating system.
Currently Windows, Mac, and Linux versions are all in the works.
No current release date has been set as of yet, but you can follow his progress at the homepage.
Topics: Stumbled On |
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