Developed by industrial designer Barton Smith, the Stream Adaptive Computer System is an interesting take on making computing easier and more adaptable to suit the user’s current needs. Today, he also unveiled the operating system and user interface that would run on Stream. It’s… Amazing.
Smith has been developing this concept for a while now – it was first unveiled in October 2008. The basic goal of Stream is to eradicate the multitude of computing devices we own today, and consequently, their overlap. This should reduce complexity by a great deal. Stream achieves this by breaking the computer down into modules.
“The Stream concept consist of Experience Modules (Media, Memories, Connections, Documents, Creations, Games), the Core Component, Component Modules (processors, memory, graphics, power), a 3.5″ Portable Display and Charging Cradle and Universal Charging Base,” the description reads, “The former three are paramount to the system, while the latter three are non-essential or functionally flexible.”
This means that the actual computer part of a computer has been broken down into modules that the user can connect to achieve greater functionality. The base of the system is made up of the Core Component, and if a user only needs to write documents and browse the internet, all he further needs are the Connections and Documents modules. If people want more processing power, they can buy additional Component Modules.
You can take the device with you, or attach it to any display you want – be it a small portable one, or a larger stationary one. No more need for a desktop, a laptop, a phone, a music player, and whatever – it’s all the same device, just hooked up to a different display or module configuration.
What Smith hadn’t shown yet was the concept operating system that is supposed to run on Stream. The concept he developed over the past few years, dubbed Locus OS, is incredibly well-thought out, and makes a lot of sense (at least to me). The modularity concept of the hardware is extended into the software – the word that kept popping into my head is clever.
The file manager specifically is something I find incredibly interesting – sadly, it gets little screen time. The file manager displays groups of files as projects, and within those projects, files are displayed in a more real-world fashion, but without the ‘gimmickness’ of things like BumpTop.
Important note: the Microsoft branding during the boot screen has been added simply to make it seem more real – Smith is in no way affiliated with Microsoft. Also interesting is a note posted underneath the video: “This interface was designed before iPhone 3.0, Palm Pre, Android etc, making the ideas original at the time. :)”
Locus OS Interface from Barton Smith on Vimeo.
Can we please have someone snag up this concept and turn it into reality? Maybe we have a billionaire in the OSAlert audience who wishes to invest in a project like this? This designer has vision, a very clear and clever idea of where computing should go. This type of work reminds me of the visionaries of yore, like Engelbart and Kay.
Very interesting stuff, and I’d love to see more about this.
for most people the computer of the future will be a mobile phone (note for all the imbeciles: that is why they need multitasking)
Maybe something with a form factor like PC-Card (former PCMCIA) might work, all SOC and memory is on that card and the display and the battery is the other part.
Quite compelling vision, it like it more than having all your data in someone elses cloud.
BUT it will be very hard switch, it has be some kind of cross vendor standard .. like that is going to happen anytime soon.(might be a good idea for smaller vendors to form such a group, where innovation around these “systems on card” can occur)
And people will need to buy all these displays for different tasks ..
But this Demo doesn’t look like Productivity would be on your side.
For the most part I like what I’m seeing, but it was too short of a demo to get a real good feel for the system. I would have liked to seen him go through some more everyday tasks, email, web browser, word processor, file manager and so on. But it was enough of a view to tell a few things about the project.
The ideas shown here seem very similar to the core ideas behind projects like Moblin, dividing things up based on activities or uses rather than files and programs. Its a good idea and the implementations are getting better and better but they all still feel like they need more user testing, especially for more productivity related tasks since these things always seem designed from a content consumption perspective, not creation.
Also the ‘real world’ file manager is just as gimmicky as all other real world file managers I have seen. They all suck and people should just move on from this concept. The idea is to make things better than real life not just recreate it.
Nice. It’s good to see someone else has been think along the same lines. I toyed with the modular computer concept myself for some time. You can read a blurb I put up about it a number of years ago at bottom of: http://psytower.com/psytech/research.xml.
The idea is a good one, but it’s not something easily done with off the shelf components –and hence a lot of money would need to go in to it to bring it to life.
Luckily (more or less) cell phones are driving the market in that direction any way.
Edited 2010-02-09 00:04 UTC
KDE4 with activities can do this already. Correction: the technologies already seem to be there. It can be done.
So, the concept is not new. KDE4 is already designed for activities based on needs of the user at a point in time. This is not unlike the concept of ‘location’.
some really old task oriented concepts
some layout ideas already implemented here and there
some styling already seen somewhere
vista, osx, moblin
though I would give it a test run if they remove that microsoft logo in the future
I really don’t like the modular components idea. For example, why have a “productivity module” when the productivity applications can be stored on the main hard disk? Storage is cheap. (This idea may make sense for something like a more powerful graphics card for gaming.)
Also, I don’t like the UI much. It sort of reminds me of 10/GUI ( http://10gui.com/ ), which I think is much better.
I love the hardware ideas of 10/GUI but I am a bit sceptical of the proposed touch interface. There seems to be very little gestures left for the actualy applications (since almost all are being used for managing windows).
Still, 10/GUI is the most interesting UI concept I’ve seen in a long long time.
How are 5 devices with 2 overlapping features any different than 2 devices with 5 overlapping features? If all I had was a desktop computer and cell phone to fulfill my digital needs, why would I fragment any further? It seems I would just try to shove one into the other if I was really concerned about getting rid of fragmentation and overlap. Or even easier, just make my data portable.
… providing answers to question no one is asking.
I love the renderings though, but when you are more interested in designing a very stylish screwdriver than actually providing a solution. One may be led into think that every application/problem is a screw…
“Memories”? “Creations”? Please cut the cutesy, fluffy-bunny names. WTF is ‘Creations’ supposed to be anyway?
Its almost the same concept as the guys from moblin use.
A good ui, but no new ideas.
Some of it is quite interesting, and it’s good to see people exploring new ideas.
However, I think modularity is something that is primarily interesting to geeks. I doubt you can get people to understand, or appriciate this.
If there should be any modularity it should be software only. Physical modularity is prone to confusion.
This whole “natural” way of organizing thing trend that BumpTop is pushing seems backwards to me. Isn’t the great advantage of computers that despite our tendencies to make a mess, our computer will have order in our documents?
It seems very boring and counter-productive. The animations are boring after a while and the task categorization is arbitrary, to say the least. The names are counter-intuitive, and there is no real progress in the actual application interfaces.
I don’t like the whole concept. Whether we like it or not, all the things in the world are interconnected and interdependant. Creating artificial classes and divisions is – IMHO – childish.
I’m not impressed. It seems flowery and unintuitive. How does this demonstration illustrate an improvement upon the status quo?
How is it somehow more intuitive to tuck away applications in obscure locations within the UI in THIS way rather than the way we’re doing it now?
nothing revolutionary here. MacOSX Snow Leopard, Windows 7, KDE 4, etc. still have the same old-fashioned UI based on windowing. Pixel here, pixel there, different panels, different menus… Basically all these user interfaces are same. The future of computing is in windowless user interfaces. Is it so difficult to understand? Multitasking is possible with windowless applications, and especially Linux with its virtual desktops is great for developing such user interfaces. Forget desktops – they are already past. In a couple of years we will have extra tin tablets with multi-touch technology, and ‘modern’ user interfaces just don’t fit in such devices. Neither MacOSX, Windows7, KDE or Gnome are suitable for touch technology. Apple understood a little bit of this by designing UI with windowless applications in iPhone and iPad which is just the first step. Microsoft is doing something similar with Surface.