Building on the Vision of the Natural UI - Microsoft Research's Zooming User Interface

Building on the vision of the natural UI, a Microsoft's Research technology has grown into the Zooming User Interface, also known as Zumobi. Now, Zumobi is, by all means, not a Microsoft project. The start-up, formerly code-named ZenZui, however, is lead by former employees from the Redmond company. And on top of it all the Zooming User Interface and mobile-widget platform that is Zumobi is based on technology developed by Microsoft Research and licensed via Microsoft's IP Ventures unit. On December 14th, Zumobi became available as a beta download delivering support for Windows Mobile 5 and 6, Blackberry, iPhone and other mobile platforms.

"The Zumobi team has been working for over a year to make this product a reality, and we're very excited to launch the first version of our public Beta today", said Zumobi CEO Eric Hertz. "Our partners who have created Zumobi Tiles for the initial Beta have delivered an excellent portfolio of news, entertainment, travel content and more."

The idea is not new. In fact, Loke Uei Tan, Technical Product Manager in the Windows Mobile Team of Microsoft, claims to have done something similar in the past. Zumobi "allows you to run applications or in this case 'tiles' by just tapping the appropriate numbers on the keypad/keyboard/area of the screen that corresponds to the tiles on the screen. This navigation method reminds me of my old old really old accounting application that we wrote in Turbo Pascal for the IBM PC MSDos that uses a tile based interface. We thought that was the most revolutionary way of navigating menus. If only we'd patented it then", Loke Uei Tan said.

While being a user interface for mobile devices, virtually reinventing the navigation of web-based content, Zumobi also fits into the vision of the natural UI. The concept was advertised lately by none other than Microsoft Chairman, Bill Gates. Additional examples of devices implementing natural interfaces are Nintendo's Wii, Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch and Microsoft Surface. Zumobi is, of course, a beta, and still has a long way to go before it will reach the level of Surface, but the potential is there.