I’ve been gearing up to post on advances in user experience, particularly interfaces that use AJAX (Asynchronous Java and XML), and to give a shout-out to some extraordinary interface designers. Then Lee Wilson sent me a link to this video and article in the upcoming February edition of Fast Company and AJAX faded into the background. Every so often an idea comes along that changes everything, and less frequently somebody pulls it off. This is one of those times (it’s also a large file but worth the wait): [kml_flashembed movie="http://services.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/271543545" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" flashVars="videoId=422563006&playerId=271543545&viewerSecureGatewayURL=https://services.brightcove.com/services/amfgateway&servicesURL=http://services.brightcove.com/services&cdnURL=http://admin.brightcove.com&domain=embed&autoStart=true&" base="http://admin.brightcove.com" name="flashObj" width="486" height="412" seamlesstabbing="false" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" swLiveConnect="true" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash">" width="400" height="350"/]

“Jefferson Han, a pale, bespectacled engineer dressed in Manhattan black, faced the thousand or so attendees on the first day of TED 2006, the annual technology, entertainment, and design conference in Monterey, California. The 30-year-old was little more than a curiosity at the confab, where, as its ad copy goes, “the world’s leading thinkers and doers gather to find inspiration. [During his presentation] Han pulled up a two-dimensional keyboard that floated slowly across the screen. “There is no reason in this day and age that we should be conforming to a physical device,” he said. “These interfaces should start conforming to us.”

He tapped the screen to produce dozens of fuzzy white balls, which bounced around a playing field he defined with a wave of the hand. A flick of a finger pulled down a mountainous landscape derived from satellite data, and Han began flying through it, using his fingertips to swoop down from a global perspective to a continental one, until finally he was zipping through narrow slot canyons like someone on an Xbox. He rotated his hands like a clock’s, tilting the entire field of view on its axis–an F16 in a barrel roll. He ended his nine-minute presentation by drawing a puppet, which he made dance with two fingers. He basked in the rock-star applause. Story continues here…