How will we interact with devices in the future

I am not that old… 34 yo… but I can remember discovering the first mouse of my life when my dad came back home with our first personal computer: an Apple IIC… I was 10 and I learned to use the strange object faster than my parents. It felt… intuitive.

Technology has evolved and ergonomists and designers  are now completely involved in technology creation. This means we are finding new ways to interact with machines, more intuitive, more productive, more pleasant. The recent arrival of touch, gesture and multi-touch certainly started a new era and while some are wondering whether they will have to change their mind set and learn a new way of interacting with devices, devices like the iPhone or Microsoft Surface proved that it was possible to propose a new user interface paradigm without loosing everyone… Even better, without even having to educate the users.

While I was preparing some multi-touch demos for an event (Windows Embedded Standard 7 brings Windows Touch to embedded devices!), my 3 years old son started playing with an application while I was doing something else. Without any instructions (I bet he observed me before), he was able to manipulate pictures. Check this out:

Ok, my son is a genius…

So, what’s next after multi-touch? Microsoft Research has a lot of projects going on studying this, and here is one example of how we could interact with devices (all the technologies already exist today):

And here is a really interest talk about interaction with data/machines/devices. We are definitively at the edge of a major change…

…to learn more about Pranav Mistry work. go to his Website.