Do you remember the Minority Report? Imagine you arrive home and you enter your bedroom: Widgets fly around enabling the control of your IoT devices, feeding you with relevant information, and providing you with data-driven action proposals for the start of your weekend.
According to Incari HMI Development Platform’s CEO Osman Dumbuya it won’t take 2054 until most people control their devices in mid-air. His company created an HMI development platform that forces HMI design from the backrooms of highly specialized teams of engineers, developers, and technicians to the toolkit of every creative.
But what is this HMI and what kind of challenges does it impose?
Human-machine-interface refers to every kind of configuration that integrates the interaction between human behavior and technological devices. These arrangements have a long history going back to the pre-industrial age when the first machines were created and the requirement to command and control them arose. Following the enhancing performance of technological innovations, we could observe an increasing interdependency between them and their human counterparts. While the mechanical fabrications had initially been concocted to solve human problems, technological problems became human problems and called for enhanced usability to handle the continuously increasing complexity of the human-machine-entanglements.
With the uprise of the mass-market computer age, mankind rapidly advanced in creating new ways of human-machine interaction. Buttons and punch-cards turned into keyboards and were made accessible to the mainstream by Amiga and Spectrum. In 1984 it was the Macintosh from Apple that displayed its functionalities through a graphical user interface and came along with the mouse as the primary input device. Only one year later the first Nintendo Entertainment System arrived and opened new realities that interacted through a ramified system comprising your hands, the controller, the TV, and most likely your cohabitants. Nowadays touchscreens, voice-controlling technologies, and motion control have become everyday standards in mass-market human-machine interfaces. For the upcoming decades, one of the central goals of human-machine interface manufacturing will target the development of brain-computer interfaces that will be commanded through the sheer power of your mind.
“The user interface of the future won’t be just on screens.” Paul Jankowski, Lead of Business Development from Incari platform states. Working in an environment that is rapidly revolutionizing human behavior calls for a different approach when thinking about development. That is why Incari’s scope is not limited to the user interface design but focused on the greater effort of creating a unique and user-centred experience. Whether it is the latest haptics technology, voice and gesture control, AR/VR/SR, 3D audio, eye tracking or stereoscopic displays, companies like Incari collaborate with the biggest innovators of future HMI technologies to create a seamless interplay of upcoming innovations long before the respective hardware arrives. For this purpose, Incari provides the bricks to create connectivity, a set of integrated, predefined nodes that are ready-to-use plug-ins and are continuously reworked along with the evolution of the corresponding technologies.
Already known in the German Automotive industry for its modular architecture that streamlines the cross-department-collaboration during recent years Incari HMI Development has evolved as the platform to connect and conduct the orchestra of the multifarious instruments that create the unique symphony of your individual environment. Back in the days, CGI Studio GmbH’s Incari started with HMI projects for Porsche and Volkswagen until they decided to create their one-stop solution for the entire HMI-production process. Ever since Incari has been adopted by more and more German car manufacturers for the future-proof technology it provides. Today HMI creation is simplified through their native 3D engine and the visual coding that allows designers to work on content in the same window as their colleague engineers who program the connectivity of different components. Incari is one of the platforms that provide the opportunity of a visual coding editor that enables the coding without writing a single line of code.
What will the future of HMI bring?
Rooted in the automotive industry, due to its special needs for innovative and secure connectivity solutions HMI platforms are spreading out to all areas of life. Years ago companies like Incari already blurred the disciplinary boundaries in the HMI development processes. Today they continue to smudge the boundaries between human and non-human-activity to simplify the operation of our devices as well as our lives. Tomorrow there will likely be an operating system, specifically designed to interconnect the multifariousness of immersive technologies, which will not only circulate through automotive, medical devices and engineering processes but is easy to use and affordable enough to become the future’s every-day standard for basically everyone.
