The Astonishing Tribe, the design firm that more or less defined the look and feel of Android the first time around, has built an entirely new homescreen interface for the OS, in 3D. It’s alternately beautiful, gratuitous and bizarre.
What you’re seeing in the video is a recording of a live demo; TAT Home is a real piece of software, and one that I’ve seen in action on a handset before the concept was made public. My feeling now is the same as it was then: There’s a lot of eye candy here, and some concepts that could definitely stick—I’m thinking about the homescreen switcher, in particular—though a lot of the widgets and concepts go a little overboard. What’s exciting whether you like the UI concept or now, though, is how close it shows we are to full 3D cellphone interfaces, and how well current hardware could run them.
TAT Home could end up as a standalone app, though I’d expect most of the adoption to come through carrier or handset maker partnerships; none have been announced yet, but don’t be surprised if it hit the market under a different name, with a slightly different look. [TAT]
