towards better interaction

Recently i got a comment about the latest article of cleartrip.com. In his comment, Saurabh mentioned about showing bumptop. Bumptop is quite old, but i think it would be fun to see. Sorry if you have already come across it.

BumpTop is a prototype graphical user interface, designed to enhance traditional computer desktop functionality by more closely supporting the normal behavior of a real world desk. It is aimed at stylus interaction, making it more suitable for tablet pcs and palmtops. It was created at the University of Toronto as Anand Agrawala’s Masters Thesis. Anand Agarawala also gave a presentation at the TED conference about his idea.

In BumpTop, documents are described by three-dimensional boxes lying on a virtual 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 gesture. Multiple selection is performed by means of a LassoMenu, which fluidly combines into a single stroke the act of lasso selection and action invocation via pie menus.

I would say its an intelligent and metaphoric extension of our normal mac or windows desktop.