Rachel Hinman, Mobile Design Strategist for Adaptive Path, talks at UX Week 2008 and imagines the future of mobile technology. Rachel covers three emigrant and important themes. 1) Re-thinking the relationship with devices and how to make them less consuming of people’s attention and more of an enabler of contextual tasks. 2) Instead of looking for answers, it is much better to seek understanding when it comes to mobile needs. 3) Senses can play an important role in creating powerful experiences for mobile devices.

Continually progressing UI in the mobile phone arena, The Astonishing Tribe does it again with Nexus. In their latest demo, TAT shows off LinkFlow, Drag and Drop, and a whole host of other newly minted features in the TAT Cascades code.

Hard at work, TAT (The Astonishing Tribe) demonstrated its 3D Eye UI at Mobile World Congress 2009. The prototype system demonstrates the use of eyetracking to simulate 3D windows layers by manipulating the UI layers based on the positioning of the screen relative to the person looking at it. To see the method explained, check out Jonny Lee’s 3D head tracking using the Wiimote.

TAT (The Astonishing Tribe) demonstrates its Foldout UI at Mobile World Congress 2009. Utilizing a physics engine, the screen content reacts as the user flings content around the screen reminiscent to the game Little Big Planet on the Sony PlayStation.

Patrick Baudisch from Microsoft Research speaks at the University of Washington. His research deals with solving user interface design challenges presented by both very small and very large interfaces.