With mobile technologies advancing at a phenomenal rate, it is worth pausing for a moment to think about what we are developing, how we will interact with them and what they will bring to our lives. This is a short post on some incredible advances in interactive technologies and ways in which they are being used.
Bret Victor in his article A brief rant on the future of interaction design, notes that with such incredible features as hands, we should make more use of their skills rather than relying on only a single digit to navigate our world. He made these comments after seeing the following video.
Victor points out that this is not such a problem at the moment, but that if a vision of the future is solely based on making skinnier tablets, with less areas to hold onto, and making grander desktops for us office workers, then we are forgetting about a whole range of instances that we could transform.
While wandering around wiki, after following a link from Bret Victor, I found an incredible amount of technologies that blew my mind. Organic user interface, Haptic technology, Tangible user interface and much much more sounded incredible. These articles are all well worth a read.
Pattie Maes unveils her and Pranav Mistry’s Sixth Sense project in this TED talk in 2009. Truly interactive features, using any available surface as a screen. This reads like a sci-fi movie. Wherever you go you can tell who people are, what their background is, what friends you have in common and where they work (well almost).
On a scary level this interactive Facebook app http://www.takethislollipop.com/ is pretty terrifying. Having been released shortly before Halloween, it has almost 10million ‘likes’ already.
