Bad UX is bad, even in the future…

Augmented and Virtual reality gadgets are definitely a part of our technological future, but putting aside the current toastery (is that a real word?) form of the goggles you need to wear in order to immerse yourself in this brave new world, does the UX need to be so complex just to fulfill science fiction visions from the 60’s?

Let’s take one of my favorite all time movies, the dystopian, philosophical masterpiece called “Blade Runner” (the original one) that influenced countless other movie visions of the future,

In one section of the movie when our hero, Deckerd (Harrison Ford) is trying to scan a picture he found for clues, he focuses on what seems to be the only available interface he has with the computer and asks it to focus on specific areas of the picture in the most cumbersome way possible – talking to it and calling out interesting coordinates.

This is obviously simply bad UX, even when speech recognition will gain human like understanding, why would you tell someone standing next to you to look at a specific coordinate by talking instead of pointing or touching the area you want to look at? this is simply a waste of your time, as you can see in the scene below:

Combine that scene with the one from minority report below, and what do you get?

That’s right, bad UX!

Nobody wants to push virtual buttons in mid air without having some tactile feedback, you don’t need to own any special hardware to know that, just wave your arms in the air and try touch an imaginary button, it simply doesn’t work.

So why does Microsoft and other AR and VR vendors insist on using such cumbersome interfaces?

My guess is that it is a mixture of being stuck in Hollywood’s none practical vision plus a need to find technical simplicity and elegance when selling new gadgets, but until these vendors stop focusing on just one specific human interface (gestures, speech…) and enable multiple interactions, adaption will never pick up in the real world.