Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Transforming the User Interface (03 Sep 2004) One of the interesting future projects that came out of the user studies was a concept for a new type of morphing. They found out that users wanted to control objects as though they had a skeleton inside. So Vronay and his team are developing a new graphics primitive that they call a skinned polygon. It's a simplified version of the boned animation primitives in more complex 3D animation programs. The user can animate the figure by moving the bones, and the system will transform the skin around them. The main takeaway for Vronay was that basic assumptions are worth questioning. "Do we really need this old interface that we've always had? Maybe there's something we can do now that's better for the user." Article URL: http://research.microsoft.com/displayArticle.aspx?id=703 Read 124 more articles from Microsoft sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Communication And Technology In The Workplace     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy