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The future of the human-computer interface?

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21–30 of 37 posts

Re: The future of the human-computer interface?

#21
A whole lot of talk with nothing to show for.

The first iPhone was released 10 years ago and it was an actual product you could buy.

The only concrete device they linked was https://www.technologyreview.com/s/534206/a-brain-computer-i....

"Blackrock has begun selling the wireless processor, which it calls “Cereplex-W” and costs about $15,000, to research labs that study primates. Tests in humans could happen quickly, says Florian Solzbacher, a University of Utah professor who is the owner and president of Blackrock. The Brown scientists have plans to try it on paralyzed patients, but haven’t yet done so."

It's incredibly expensive and they are primarily using it for animal tests.

If it's so obvious that this is going to replace keyboards, etc within 10 years then show me at least one consumer product that I can buy today for less than $1000.

Re: The future of the human-computer interface?

#22
post #5

Anybody willing to take a bet that my keyboard is not going anywhere in my lifetime? The first time I was told that voice recognition is here and my keyboard is going away was about 20 years ago. Here I am today, still strangling to have Alexa understand simple commands. Thought controlled input? Forget about it in this lifetime.

I'm sitting on the couch on a Saturday morning with...an iPad. My keyboard is still at the office, but I don't use it as much as I used to.

[deleted]

Re: The future of the human-computer interface?

#23
post #14
post #13

"Expect the way you interact with your laptop, tablet, and smartphone to change a lot in the next five to 10 years." I am going to bet the opposite; we will interact with laptop, phones and tablets roughly in the same way as we do now in ten years. Voice control, thought control and VR headsets will be mostly a dud for anything beyond games and novelty.

We said that about touch, and now most human-computer interaction is via touch screen.

Most human-computer interaction involves games and novelty-seeking.

Re: The future of the human-computer interface?

#24
post #14
post #13

"Expect the way you interact with your laptop, tablet, and smartphone to change a lot in the next five to 10 years." I am going to bet the opposite; we will interact with laptop, phones and tablets roughly in the same way as we do now in ten years. Voice control, thought control and VR headsets will be mostly a dud for anything beyond games and novelty.

We said that about touch, and now most human-computer interaction is via touch screen.

I don't think "we" did. And also I would argue that going to touch from say a mouse or lightpen (which I think predates mouse-based interfaces) is essentially an incremental improvement on the same kind of user interface compared going to things suggested in this article (voice control, thought control).

Re: The future of the human-computer interface?

#25
post #5

Anybody willing to take a bet that my keyboard is not going anywhere in my lifetime? The first time I was told that voice recognition is here and my keyboard is going away was about 20 years ago. Here I am today, still strangling to have Alexa understand simple commands. Thought controlled input? Forget about it in this lifetime.

I'm more on your side than not when it comes to these bombastic claims. That said I think consumer level mind interfaces will happen, and be useful, but much more so as a way to augment traditional input.

It's a bit boring to think about, but given some of the research that has been able to reconstruct a (poor) image from brain activity, I could imagine using something like that to open applications by imagining their icon.

Continue down this line of thinking and it is entirely possible that we will begin to construct an entirely new symbolic language to interact with these interfaces. I mean if a picture is worth a thousand words, maybe it's more effective path to follow than obsessing over perfect speech recognition.

Re: The future of the human-computer interface?

#26
post #10

I'm calling bull. I would not trust some device to read my thoughts to write them to a Word document. Random thoughts are too uncontrollable. I would not trust my phone to connect automatically to any device, I see that's a huge risk. I would not trust my computer when I talk to it. Anyone can hear the conversation and it's disturbing in public spaces to other people. We saw this happen with Google Glass. People need…

I would love to be able to write code just with my thoughts. With the keyboard is not that bad, but in certain moments feels like the main bottleneck.

I recommend reading an article about dude who was unable to code with his hands, so he uses voice commands to code faster than with keyboard[1].

[1]: http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/using_voice_to_code.html

Re: The future of the human-computer interface?

#27
post #5

Anybody willing to take a bet that my keyboard is not going anywhere in my lifetime? The first time I was told that voice recognition is here and my keyboard is going away was about 20 years ago. Here I am today, still strangling to have Alexa understand simple commands. Thought controlled input? Forget about it in this lifetime.

How old are you? It’s really not that hard to imagine the keyboard being replaced by one, or a combination, of technologies in the next decade or two.

Voice has gotten dramatically better in the past few years. Another decade? There are also gesture technologies:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0QNiZfSsPc0

Anyway, if you’ve got 3 or 4 decades of life, you still think we won’t have sufficient advances to replace the keyboard?

Re: The future of the human-computer interface?

#28
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tablets and smartphones are a new device class which increased the amount of human-computer interaction. You're implying we also mostly use touch screens on previously existing platforms like desktops, laptops, gaming consoles and TVs. Those platforms haven't changed their primary input method to touch.

Nintendo DS, 3DS, 2DS, WiiU, Switch, and Sony PS Vita are all touch screen.

They also all have directional pads, joysticks, and tactile buttons.
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