You may call me messy, but I know where my stuff is. For some people, unorganization is organization. Clean my desk, and I’d be lost, not knowing where anything is. A new prototype, BumpTop, is incorporating these ‘real-life’ methods into your computer’s desktop. 

Set in a 3D world, Bumptop provides a whole new look and feel for your documents on your desktop. Similar to a deck of playing cards, they can be stacked neatly, fanned out, or thrown about (and I do mean thrown). There is a built in physics engine simulating such details as force and mass. It’s truely unique in that you can toss a document aside, watching it interact with the other documents that stand in its way.

The whole concept behind this is to imitate real life, allowing the user to incorporate methods similar to what they would use on their real life desktop. These methods give us the ability to do virtually anything to our documents such as stacking them by category (images, docs, videos), and even tossing them to the back or front as they become irrelevant or relevant.

Aside from moving a single document at a time, there are built in methods that allow the user to stack/unstack multiple documents using a “lasso” technique; where you would circle the cursor around the documents that you wanted to stack up.

One interesting scenario that the creators propose, is the possibility to apply these techniques to windowed applications in a much similar way you can view web pages in IE 7 using “quick tabs.”

While we may not see this technology any time soon, the creators offer the option to recieve an e-mail to hear about beta testing oportunities when they become available, and a video demo which can be viewed through Youtube.

Related:

Entry was posted on Tuesday, December 12th, 2006 at 2:31 pm under Technology.

Read more entries by George Gardner.
Stumble It!