Fidgets: Building Blocks for a Predictive UI Toolkit

The rapid growth of AR platforms, combined with the rising predictive power of intelligent systems, will fundamentally change interactive computing. Interaction will increasingly happen on the go, causing I/O to become constrained, ultimately leading to reliance on user intent prediction for aid. In this pictorial, we argue that to support the development of such systems, new predictive UI toolkits are required. We place the reader in the shoes of an App designer and outline the challenges that will be faced. We then describe a new predictive toolkit, leveraging Fuzzy Widgets, or “Fidgets” as the main UI building block. Fidgets extend Responsive Design into the realm of intelligent systems, to adapt not only to spatial constraints, but to system predictions as well. We then describe a working implementation of a predictive music application, built using our described framework, showcasing its benefits and range of adaptive abilities.​