Mozilla Labs, already releasing innovations that hint at the Web in the coming years, has launched the Concept Series. This is an initiative that pushes for the “development of the online experience” where everyone can contribute.
We’re hoping to lower the barrier to participation by providing a forum for surfacing, sharing, and collaborating on new ideas and concepts. Our goal is to bring even more people to the table and provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole.
Concepts may take the form of Ideas, Mockups or Prototypes.
The Concept Series starts strong with several concept videos from Adaptive Path, Wei Zhou, and Aza Raskin.
Aurora Concept Video by Adaptive Path
Lifestream - Redesign history and bookmarking by Wei Zhou
Firefox Mobile Concept Video by Aza Raskin
Of the three, Aurora is clearly the most ambitious as it demonstrates with 4 videos how future web browsing will be completely intuitive and pervasive. Websites can share information with one another so that a user can extract relevant information. The Web will continue to act as information provider regardless of location or the real-world objects and situations he is dealing with.
Multitouch technology is also gaining traction as the ideal way to interface with the Web. Specially assigned gestures will become especially convenient on small mobile devices. Mimicking a 3-dimensional space is another popular concept which also addresses space constraints. And of course, aside from advances in software, hardware will also play a major role in the interactions onscreen.
What’s your idea for the future of the Internet? Contribute to the Mozilla Labs Concept Series and have your say. Remember, the best way to be prepared for the future is to make it ourselves!
Remember in the movie, Minority Report, Tom Cruise had that screen interface he controlled with gestures as he browsed through information? Eventually we’ll probably be browsing through the internet in a similar way. Over the last several months there have been some new tools released inching forward in the move from a flat browsing experience to truly browsing through the “space” of cyberspace.
Here are four recent releases that are taking baby steps in that direction, attempting to give us a “bird’s eye view” of the internet, the interconnectedness of sites, and even connections between people in social networks.
TouchGraph
Offering a Google browser and a Facebook browser, TouchGraph shows how sites and people are connected in an interactive visual map.
Walk2Web
Users of Walk2Web can visualize the connections between sites as they’re browsing, while allowing them to view, review, bookmark and vote for their favorite sites.
TwitterBlocks
Twitter Blocks is a new tool that allows users to visualize 3D Twitter “neighborhoods” in an abstract block formation and discover other users with similar interests.
SpaceTime
SpaceTime displays search results from Google, Yahoo, and even Ebay in 3D space. The browser also offers 3D tabbed browsing.
There are also tools on the horizon such as ICCARUS, a 3D network visualization tool, and Sun’s open source Looking Glass project that turns the user’s desktop into a 3D environment.
Interesting stuff, but is it really all that useful? Maybe not, but you have to start somewhere I suppose. The difficulty is that trying to visualize data that is so complex with so many interconnections becomes unwieldy and difficult to use and understand in 3D space. You only have to take a look at the ICCARUS demo to see how impossibly complex a basic social network appears when rendered visually in 3D.
What do you think web browsing will be like in 10-15 years? Will we gesture through the web on giant screens like Tom had in Minority Report? Would browsing the web in 3D be inherently better? I think we’ll end up with some combination of the two, and in fact I think that the Walk2Web example is maybe the most useful of the 4 and is the closest to how I imagine browsing a decade from now. Not only does it contain the social aspect of Web2.0, but we see connections between sites, thumbnails and scrolling feeds as well. Have you used any of the four? Have you found them to be useful, or just eye candy?
This article was written by Randa Clay. Read more about design, marketing, blogging, branding and all things creative at RandaClay.com.
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