So for instance, death is (in their categories)

• Black for categories: western europe/american/japanase and native american
• White for categories: hindu/chinese
• Blue for category: muslim
• Green for category: south american

“Love” is, apparently, either red, green, yellow or blue depending which category you’re looking at, and “intelligence” black, white, pale or dark blue.  So much for color consistency …

It’s also been known for a while now that color isn’t really seen by the eyes, but by the brain.  What that means is, even though the “hardware” of our eyes can differ hugely (by as much as 40x in terms of color receptors), most people will perceive the same type of color as a strong version of red, yellow, etc.  In addition, the brain is adept at handling the differences that lighting and context create – something called “metamerism”, which explains why objects of different color may look the same under different lighting conditions. 

An example of this sort of mind-bending illusion (click to see original) is below: the centre crosses of both objects are actually the same colour:

What this all means is that that the way we comprehend color is more based on society and context, than biology.  Add in geography into the mix, and color isn’t as stable a concept as it might at first seem.  And yet it can influence our driving in milliseconds, the effectiveness of the drugs we take, and ultimately most of the things we do every day, offline and online.

But it’s a deal more complex than red=stop and green=go.

Problem #1
This is the deal-breaker for me: the screen refresh. Each page-change means watching a page that’s supposed to be a paper analog flash “black” and then “white” again. Every time. Flash. Flash.  That process takes anywhere from 1 second to about 4 on the readers I’ve seen.

Problem #2
Future versions of eInk will support colour.  I can probably wait.

Problem #3
Not all books are available as ebooks.  So, take both?  Seems heavy.

Problem #4

The “uncanny valley” describes the revulsion effect when robots get very close to being alike to humans. Actually something that is intentionally less accurate is more likely to be perceived as human-like.  Hence Avatar’s colors.

This same “uncanny valley” applies to ebook readers. They are getting close to paper, and therefore the differences (like the screen flash) stand out even more, as we jolt back to the reality that we’re not holding paper.

Problem #5
Ebook readers don’t like it when you drop them in the bath.

Problem #6
See Problem #1. If it weren’t for that, I’d have bought an eReader a long time ago.  I’ll probably buy an iPad, but not for book reading…

The buzz on screen tech is as follows: it’s going 3D.  James Cameron a few years ago (not long after Titanic) stated that EVERY film he made from them on would be shot to be 3D-ready, he believed in it so heartily.  Back then we thought “yeah, right, hold the coloured plastic glasses, we can do without it”.

But now it seems like all things digital are going to jump out of the screen at you. 

So, firstly, how?  Capturing is a bit more technical, but the real question is, will viewing it work for us?  3D is still generally delivered in two ways:

• Without glasses: this involves using (expensive) lenses or technology on the screen itself.  Leads to nausea apparently…
• With glasses: this involves either separately coloured lenses, polarized lenses, or lenses that “blink” about 60 times a second so the image only gets to one eye at a time.  Leads to, you guessed it, nausea apparently…

Nausea aside, the “blinking” glasses win at the moment as screen technology is still far too expensive: in fact 3D giant Nvidia is selling the glasses right now for $199, and by all accounts it kind of works, as long as you have a decent screen.  I’ve tried something similar to Nvidia’s product, and yes,  it kind of works.  But only kind of.

So what’s missing?  The real issue is that this is not 3D.  This is 3D within a screen.  That’s not how 3D works for our brains.  The real 3D is all around us, and if we reach out, we can touch it.

And getting that sort of 3D means only one thing: plugging into our brains.  The tipping point with user interface technology is this: once we can plug into brains, we can do away with everything else.  We can chuck mice, keyboards, 3D glasses away.  We simply won’t need them – because it will all be there, on demand, in our brains.

Pretty Girls Make Graves Good Health mp3 album

Until then, this tech site alongside videophones on the “keep trying” list - although the BMW Z4 example is pretty great example of augmented reality.

I won’t spoil it, give it a go!

So, another step closer to replacing actors in movies?  Probably, but also a step closer to building more vivid, friendly and familiar interfaces with our various machines.

“[there will be] a resurgence of interest and invention around the user-interface experience… as we enable the UI to become interactive, immersive and intuitive.  We expect that to begin to occur as we move to terrascale computing.”

Though the whole reinvention of the obvious did make me think of the ad that’s showing on TV right now from a car company, asking how things would be if we could design them from scratch again.  They then showed a world with whackily designed lamp posts, water hydrants etc., and eventually their new car.  Thing is, if we designed things from scratch again – guess what, they’d look exactly like they do right now…  In any case, demo of sphere-touchscreen below: