Shove over, desktop - BumpTop to play fast and loose with digital media

I've had an ongoing argument with whoever will listen that computer software controls and widgits are lame, and that the infinite potential in the graphic desktop has gone virtually untapped. We see the same old boring icons, files, folders, knobs and sliders year after year. Sure these widgits and metaphors are easy to learn, but so is the use of a hammer. I get excited when I see cool new control paradigms, because of the new ways they will allow me to interact with digital media. I want a music software laser cannon with 3D turbo everything, not an emulated digital hammer.

The BumpTop Pysical Desktop Interface prototype is a really cool development that sprung from a University of Toronto masters thesis. It shows promise and innovation by demonstrating a natural, yet innovative approach to the management of discrete chunks of information on the desktop. Using physics modelling, and creative extensions to a simple paradigm, BumpTop opens all kinds of imaginative doors.

BumpTop explores two things - the concept of the pile as the basic organizational unit, and the use of a pen interface to interact with objects the desktop. It's a lot easier to understand what Anand Agarawala and Ravin Balakrishnan have come up with by watching a video of the prototype.

Objects can be piled, or separated, combined and dragged. They can be de-emphasised by 'tossing' them to a distant part of the desktop. Commands, accessible through pen gestures, allow the easy previewing of the contents of a pile - here I envision the playback of audio snippets while sorting through a pile of digital samples. Because of the use of physics modelling, things move loosely on the BumpTop - when you shove an object, other objects it come into contact with are shuffled realistically. It's clear that working with BumpTop would be fluid, intuitive, and dynamic, and the richness of the command set, which is revealed in the video, shows that there is a lot more potential here than just the sorting of some drum loops with a pen.

Imagine BumpTop used as a way of organizing tracks for a sequencer, or of storing and retrieving video clips. We would have entirely new ways of working with this kind of data. I invite you to apply your imaginations to this now, because there is serious interest in developing BumpTop as a real product.

I can hardly wait.