The first marketed integrated mouse — shipped as a part of a computer and intended for personal computer navigation — came with the Xerox 8010 Star Information System in 1981.
That was the last real revolution in Human-Computer interaction. Twenty seven years down the line, we talk of exciting platforms, Web 2.0, open standards, but ultimately, the vast majority are reading off a screen, typing on a keyboard and clicking a mouse. Fortunately, this decade is pointing the way to the next generation of HCI technology. The current wave of new HCI technologies includes the following:
Advanced Touch – Pointers and Stylus:This started with PDAs a long time ago, and then went into laptop computers with the Tablet PC with better but still imperfect handwriting recognition. With Apple’s use of glass in the iPhone, we can look forward to interaction with bare fingers, and the stylus being relegated to handwriting recognition.
Advanced Touch – Complex Actions: This technology was around in research and prototypes for a long time. The simplest example we knew of two-finger scrolling on Macs. Then Apple bought out FingerWorks and threw this into the mainstream with the iPhone.
Speech: Speech is that technology that has been trying to break in since the mid-1990s, but still hasn’t got much mainstream momentum. Things are changing for the better. At first, we wanted to do everything with speech. Now we’re going back and perfecting basic applications like GOOG-411. With time, speech looks almost certain to play an important part in the big picture.
Motion Sensing: This is another current generation technology that is gathering momentum. Consumer devices such as phones, laptop computers and digital cameras have built-in accelerometers. This is an exciting platform to look forward to, since most current applications are restricted by the manufaturers. It would be interesting to see what iPhone developers have in store for using the accelerometer. Even simple applications like iSnake for the iPhone are exciting.
Visual Motion Sensing: This is where the machine senses the user’s actions by visual aids such as a camera. The hardware implementation is cheap, creating the algorithms to do so is not. That said, some brilliant things have been with this technolgy. The DARPA Challenge is a competition where cars have to be built to negotiate traffic on normal city roads, obey traffic rules and get from one place to another, using IR, video and other tools. In a few years, your home computer is going to be smart enough to do things like this, and when it does, it’ll be nothing short of revolutionary.
Surface Computing: Everyone has their own vision of what surface computing should be like. Microsoft has its own, and is the first tech major to go public with it. Microsoft Surface is a combination of most of the technologies discussed above, and interacts with other devices through wireless networking.
