A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design

I see the article as pointing to incremental improvements by advocating fine motor manipulations with feedback over touching-glass-and-seeing-the-result (which is in ways harder than hitting a keyboard and at least getting some kinesthetic feedback). But I think we need to consider things in greater generality:

1) Interface designers seem universally fixated on designs that are visually and touch/kinesthetically oriented. What's missing in this is language. In a lot of ways this winds-up with interfaces which indeed look and feel great on first blush but which become pretty crappy over time given that most sophisticated human work is tied up with using language.

2) Even the touch part of interaction seldom considers what's ergonomically sustainable. Pointing with your index finder are fabulously intuitive to start with but is something you'd get really annoyed at doing constantly. There are lots of fine motor manipulations will get hard time as well.

The article focuses on "everyday object" manipulation, but he's right about technology too: there are a wealth of common HCI tools that glass cannot accommodate.

- The textual keyboard remains one of the fastest methods of text entry. It can be used without looking, offers high bandwidth, affords both serial and chorded inputs, and works well for precise navigation in discrete spaces, like text, spreadsheets, sets of objects like forms, layers, flowcharts, etc.

- MIDI keyboards are comparable, but trade discrete bandwidth for the expressiveness of pressure modulation.

- The joystick (and associated interfaces like wheels, pedals, etc) are excellent tools for orienting. They can also offer precise haptic feedback through vibration and resistance.

- The stylus is an unparalleled instrument for HCI operations involving continuous two dimensional spaces. It takes advantage of fine dexterity in a way that mice cannot, offering position, pressure (or simply contact), altitude, angle, and tip discrimination.

- Trackballs and mice are excellent tools for analogue positional input with widely varying velocities. You can seek both finely and rapidly, taking advantage of varying grips. Trackballs offer the added tactile benefits of inertia and operating on an infinite substrate.

- Dials, wheels. A well-made dial is almost always faster and more precise than up-down digital controls. They offer instant visual feedback, precise tuning, spatial discrimination, variable velocities, can be used without looking, and can be adapted for multiple resolutions.

- Sliders. Offers many of the advantages of dials--smooth control with feedback, usable without looking--but in a linear space. Trades an infinite domain for linear manipulation/display, easier layout and use in flat or crowded orientations.

And these are just some of the popular ones. You've got VR headsets for immersive 3d audio and video, haptic gloves or suits, sometimes with cabling for precise pressure and force vector feedback, variable-attitude simulators, etc. There are weirder options as well--implanted magnets or electrode arrays to simulate vision, hearing, heat, taste, etc...

Dedicated interfaces can perform far better at specific tasks, but glass interfaces offer reconfigurability at low cost. That's why sound engineers have physical mixer boards, writers are using pens or keyboards, artists are using Wacom tablets, nuclear physicists are staring at fine-tuning knobs, and motorcyclists are steering with bars, grips, and body positioning; but everyday people are enjoying using their ipad to perform similar tasks.

Glass isn't going to wipe out physical interfaces; it's just a flexible tool in an expanding space of interaction techniques. More and more devices, I predict, will incorporate multitouch displays along dedicated hardware to solve problems in a balanced way.

Kinect is an excellent example of what the author thinks it's wrong with the vision. It provides absolutely no sensory feedback.

I just watched the video, and typed my reactions, as I had them; no idea if this will be of interest.

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People still travel for meetings? By plane?

Wait, someone is driving the car? Thats not very productive.

There are bellhops? Why are there still bellhops in the future? What do they do?

Why is the screen so small? Why have a screen, if you have those perfect augmented reality glasses?

'Creating reply interface'? We still have to wait for computers?

There's still global poverty, and benefit concerts? When these people have all that fancy tech? Damn it.

Copy and Paste is still around?

Kids are still taught long division? Why? Why do they use a pencil?

Also, won't the future be one of neural interfaces? Isn't there something wrong with interfacing two electrical signal processing machines (brain + computer) via all these muscles and optical sensors and so on? I know there's a lot of science to be solved first; but surely the future of interfaces is that they are invisible, and built in to us?

Insightful.

It seems to me that the touchscreen, because of the reconfigurability you point out, is the lowest common denominator of input. It makes a lot of sense for a highly portable device, because you can pack many configurations into a small device.

I guess what I lament is the richness or input resolution you give up. And if general computing trends more toward this lowest common denominator, we're faced with an input paradigm that's impoverished in every vector.

Which, as I've stated before, only really affects the input part of it, and not the consumption part.