Know Your Platform

Much more than in a traditional mouse-based user interface (the WIMP), which has evolved under an intentional separation of the design of hardware and software, NUI requires a sophisticated knowledge of the hardware on which the software will be running. The specific technologies on which your system is built will affect the user’s experience. Know and understand them. In this chapter, we provide a framework to categorize various input and display capabilities. The goal is that you will begin to apply this framework in one (or possibly both) of two ways.: first, to have awareness of on which platforms your designed software might be run, and second, to target your software to those platforms, to create what is truly a natural user interface.