Recently many blogs started spreading a very fascinating project. A group of developers started a project called BumpTop Prototype aiming at extending the operative system desktop functions (managing files) with other metaphors related to the experience in the “real” world, or more precisely on the “real” desk.

The interface of the software.

I am definitely not a fanatic of 3D interfaces and I really like features keyboard oriented like Expose or Spotlight (both included in recent version of MacOS X) or researches like Archy, but in this case the project is targeting tablet PCs and so the interaction is limited only to the pen making it much more interesting. A doubt I have is that personally I find some real world metaphors quite limiting, just imagine the advantage of the ubiquity, so a file could be in different piles, or that the files can have a different aspect than reality, and you can use it to add information, using different colors or shapes. For these reasons personally I would consider the removal of some “real” life limitations.

Having said that, this project is impressive and considering the growing market of tablets it could have really a bright future. It will be interesting to know when this kind of computer will use multi-touch screen though, so people could eventually interact with two hands and more fingers. When it will happen, and it will happen, we will really see hardcore experimentation, almost like this :)

Watching all the interactions with the files one by one we can see very interesting ideas that show how much effort and attention the guys behind this project put in it. Probably all of these interactions look almost ideal from the demo video, but without a functional testing done in person, it would be quite stupid to come to final conclusions.

We definitely look forward to try a version on our computers but we can easily say that so far this seems probably the most promising experiment on 3D interfaces, removing many doubts interfaces like Project Looking Glass by Sun, or other I saw so far, brought.

Update: I just found out that a friend very recently reviewed it too (in Italian). I’m not suprised to find many common opinions.