Please join FITC on October 1-5 in Los Angeles for Adobe MAX 2011 which will bring together thousands of forward-thinking designers, developers, and business decision makers that are shaping the future of our industry. As part of the agenda at this year's MAX, Adobe has added the MAX Unconference area. The Unconference is a way for attendees to convene in a casual setting to share ideas as well as host their own discussion groups. This year FITC has once again been chosen as one of the organizations to run one of the Unconference areas.

While I was doing research for a virtual user interface I was creating in 3D, I spent some time looking at some of the virtual UIs that have come out of Hollywood. A lot of money and thought goes into their development, so I figured they would make good reference material for my project. While you can’t take the virtual UIs in movies at face value, they do contain some nuggets of information on what the future might hold.

Complexity

I’ve noticed that UIs in feature films are continually getting more elaborate and complex. Meanwhile, though, real-world interfaces are getting more simple and intuitive. It seems an odd contradiction that the futuristic UIs we dream up for movies follow one path, while real world ones are heading down another path.

Adobe is releasing AIR for smartphone platforms, starting with Blackberry and Android. After announcing that Flash CS5 would allow developer to build iPhone apps, Adobe is now pushing its platform onto other devices. While purists may squirm at the idea of building apps with something like AIR it will allow true multi-platform mobile development by the large and already heavily invested Flash development community. From Gizmodo:

“Failing fast” means getting putting applications out in the wild as soon as possible to learn whether they will succeed. This gives you access to early user feedback to quickly weed out ideas and methods that don’t work. Failing fast is a good thing—or, at least, it's preferable to failing slowly and spending too much time, effort and money developing a product that should have been put to rest earlier. Money and time you save by cutting off unsuccessful projects quickly will mean you have more money and time for the successful ones. The concept of failing fast can help businesspeople and stakeholders reduce the riskiness of launching products by letting real users and the marketplace dictate their product choices.