I'm Dan Farber, and if you're like me, you spend a lot oftime in front of all kinds of screens whether it's a desktop screen, a laptopscreen, a handheld screen, even looking at an LED on your refrigerator or amicrowave. So today I want to talk about "The future of the userinterface."
User interface, you can really think of as a human machineinterface. In other words, we are reacting with these machines that areessentially fairly dumb in terms of communicating except by putting a string ofcharacters on the screen. Now if we go back in time, we can start with theoriginal computing devices that humans interacted with. Typically it's a greenscreen with text on it. So the green screen we could say is our ancestor andoften times, you know, you'll see green screen and if something goes wrong withyour computer or a blue screen of death as it is sometimes called.
Now if we fast-forward in the 1970s, particularly in thelate 1970s, many companies were investing and trying to come up with betterways for human computer interaction and especially at Xerox PARC, a lab inCalifornia where they came up with this notion of windows and icons and ofcourse the little mouse connected to the computer that you could navigate onthe screen. So you could have windows that had documents and you could havefolders that include those documents and you could represent them as a list oras icons and that's pretty much what we knew as the Macintosh Interface thatcame around in 1984.
Now let's fast-forward and obviously windows came along andadopted those principles as well. If we come into this year, 2005, what do wehave? Windows, icons, folders and of course the mouse, wireless mice,two-headed mice, all kinds of different mice, but still essentially samemetaphor.
So where are we heading? Where do we have to go to makecomputers easier to use on a human scale? Well, one is speech because right nowI'm talking to you and you can hear me and we can communicate at least one way,but with the computer you should have two-way communication, so speech is abig, big deal. Now it's been around for a while, but mostly in very controlleddomains or doing something like say, "open file." But to havecontinuous speech with a computer that understands and can follow your commandsand interact with you and even talk back to you, that's a ways away. There'sprocessing power issues, there are software issues, but certainly it's going tocome and hopefully within the next 25 years.
Secondarily, we could have gesture, you can see I'mgesturing all over here. Well, why can't your computer understand yourgestures? So you can imagine in the future when everybody doesn't have justlittle screens, but you have wall-sized screens, huge screens that cover allkinds of information. For example, if you're doing a search, do you want tolook at a list or you want to have it displayed in a kind of matrix where youcan move things around with your hands, by gesture or even with your eyes. Sothat kind of technology is around, but it's still fairly in its infancy.
Then finally, we could say that something we all know aboutif you've ever played a computer game is 3D moving from 2D and to a more 3Denvironment. Virtual reality kinds of environments where the computer becomesalmost like a game environment except it's used for your productivity, for yourinteraction with a computer and it's customized to your needs. So hopefullywithin the next 25 years we'll get beyond just the icons, windows and mouse.
