interfaces

A short compilation of the gesture and multitouch interface scenes from the film Minority Report.

A 2008 CES demo of the original Microsoft Surface, a smart table with multi-touch interaction. It shows touch manipulation of photos and objects on a tabletop display.

Pranav Mistry demos SixthSense, a wearable device that projects information onto the physical world and lets people interact with data through gestures. He also shows a paper "laptop" and says he will open-source the software.

A short demo of Sun Microsystems' Looking Glass, a 3D desktop GUI concept for a future operating system.

A scene from the film Disclosure showing its virtual reality interface, including a 3D file system visualizer.

Alan Kay demonstrates GRaIL, a graphical input language system from around 1968 in which hand-drawn strokes become boxes, connections and dataflow-style programs.

A demonstration of the 1982 Xerox Star user interface, including its desktop, icons, documents, networking and printing. The uploader argues that Apple's later Lisa and Mac interfaces evolved from these ideas rather than copying them.

Second half of a demonstration of the 1982 Xerox Star user interface. It shows how the Star differed from the later Lisa and Mac interfaces, with strengths in networking and printing and little direct manipulation.

Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky lectures on depression as a real biological disease. He covers its biological and psychological causes, how it differs from ordinary sadness, and ideas such as learned helplessness. He ties these together into one account.

A Google Tech Talk by sleep researcher Dr. William Dement on healthy sleep and performance. He argues sleep debt must be repaid and describes the three characteristics of healthy sleep.

A short clip of Steve Jobs describing the computer as a bicycle for the mind. He compares human efficiency of travel to what computers do for mental work.

Ted Nelson demonstrates Xanadu Space, his software for representing hypertext in three-dimensional space with linked, referenced content fragments.

Johnny Lee demonstrates head tracking with a Wii remote and a head-mounted pair of IR LEDs, so a screen acts like a window into a 3D scene as your head moves.

Earliest known footage of Ivan Sutherland's MIT PhD work, Sketchpad, the first computer graphics system, with commentary by Alan Kay. It shows light-pen drawing with constraints in a short clip.

Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor describes watching her own brain functions shut down during a massive stroke. She gives a first-person account of losing speech, motion and self-awareness.

Steve Jobs demos NeXTSTEP Release 3, showing the object-oriented development environment and UI that later became the basis of Mac OS X. Midway through he builds a database-backed GUI app with Interface Builder and Enterprise Objects Framework with almost no code.

Bobby McFerrin uses audience participation at a World Science Festival event to demonstrate how instinctively people follow the pentatonic scale.

A short product demo of Dabble DB, a web tool for importing, entering and manipulating structured data with little effort. It was built in Smalltalk and later acquired by Twitter.

Alan Kay's TED talk on teaching ideas, in which he argues the world is not what it seems and shows children learning through programming and building their own lessons with Etoys/Squeak.

David Rock gives a Google Tech Talk based on his book Your Brain at Work, using neuroscience to explain why focus and productivity are hard at the office. He gives strategies for managing mental energy and distraction.

A restored recording of Steve Jobs unveiling the original Macintosh in 1984, including the moment it is taken out of its bag and speaks. The upload comes from the team that rediscovered and restored the lost footage.

An edited excerpt of Steve Jobs introducing Mac OS X at Macworld San Francisco in 2000. It covers the Aqua interface, Quartz graphics built on PDF, and the Classic, Carbon and Cocoa application environments.

Jensen Harris of the Office 2007 design team tells the behind-the-scenes story of the Ribbon at MIX08. He covers early prototypes, mistakes, and the UX principles used to design and validate it.

A concept video from 2003 showing an early vision of Windows Longhorn's interface, before it shipped as Vista.

Neuroscientist Beau Lotto runs the audience through color and pattern illusions to show that perception is shaped by context and evolutionary history rather than being a direct readout of the world. The talk is playful and hands-on, and it argues that the brain interprets ambiguous signals.

A Talks at Google visit by Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the mouse. He presents his lifelong aim of augmenting collective human intelligence, followed by a Q&A.

A brief demo of the Smalltalk debugger, including defining a method that doesn't exist yet while the program is stopped mid-crash.

Johnny Chung Lee shows how infrared light pens and a Wii Remote can make a very low-cost multi-point interactive whiteboard or tablet display. Software is available for download.

Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator concept video imagines a conversational voice assistant, multi-touch tablet and video calling used by a professor. It was made years before the graphical web existed.

A short TV segment on Jill Price, a woman with highly superior autobiographical memory who recalls nearly every day of her life. She describes the good and bad sides of never forgetting.

A 2007 video review of the Neonode N1m phone, which uses touch gestures including a swipe to unlock. It was published just before the iPhone's launch.

World Builder is a short film by Bruce Branit in which a man uses holographic tools to build a world for the woman he loves.

A clip from Jurassic Park in which Lex says, "It's a Unix system, I know this," while navigating a 3D file system view.

A one-minute 1986 promo of Microsoft Windows 1.0 presented by Steve Ballmer, with a hyperbolic price pitch ending in the tag line about Nebraska.

A 2007 side-by-side demo comparing Windows Vista's Aero interface with Ubuntu running Beryl/Compiz, showing effects such as the desktop cube and burning windows.

A short screen capture of SGI's File System Navigator (FSN, also called Fusion) running on IRIX 6.5 on an Octane. It shows the 3D file browser seen in Jurassic Park.

Joshua Bloch's Google Tech Talk on how to design good APIs and why it matters, with concrete principles and examples. It treats every programmer as an occasional API designer.

David MacKay's 2007 Google Tech Talk presents Dasher, a text-entry system driven by continuous gestures and a language model, reaching about 35 words per minute with one finger and 25 hands-free. It explains the information-theory reasoning behind the design.

A Google Tech Talk arguing that the best interface requires the fewest clicks and choices, with Google search, Facebook, the iPod and Firefox as examples. It shows how minimizing interaction makes interfaces easier to learn.

A clip in which Eben Moglen tells how he grew up when software was freer and how his path crossed Richard Stallman's. He describes how they came to work together to make software free again.