The future of the user interface

I'm Dan Farber, and if you're like me, you spend a lot of time in front of all kinds of screens whether it's a desktop screen, a laptop screen, a handheld screen, even looking at an LED on your refrigerator or a microwave. So today I want to talk about "The future of the user interface."

User interface, you can really think of as a human machine interface. In other words, we are reacting with these machines that are essentially fairly dumb in terms of communicating except by putting a string of characters on the screen. Now if we go back in time, we can start with the original computing devices that humans interacted with. Typically it's a green screen with text on it. So the green screen we could say is our ancestor and often times, you know, you'll see green screen and if something goes wrong with your computer or a blue screen of death as it is sometimes called.

Now if we fast-forward in the 1970s, particularly in the late 1970s, many companies were investing and trying to come up with better ways for human computer interaction and especially at Xerox PARC, a lab in California where they came up with this notion of windows and icons and of course the little mouse connected to the computer that you could navigate on the screen. So you could have windows that had documents and you could have folders that include those documents and you could represent them as a list or as icons and that's pretty much what we knew as the Macintosh Interface that came around in 1984.

Now let's fast-forward and obviously windows came along and adopted those principles as well. If we come into this year, 2005, what do we have? Windows, icons, folders and of course the mouse, wireless mice, two-headed mice, all kinds of different mice, but still essentially same metaphor.

So where are we heading? Where do we have to go to make computers easier to use on a human scale? Well, one is speech because right now I'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 a big, big deal. Now it's been around for a while, but mostly in very controlled domains or doing something like say, "open file." But to have continuous speech with a computer that understands and can follow your commands and interact with you and even talk back to you, that's a ways away. There's processing power issues, there are software issues, but certainly it's going to come and hopefully within the next 25 years.

Secondarily, we could have gesture, you can see I'm gesturing all over here. Well, why can't your computer understand your gestures? So you can imagine in the future when everybody doesn't have just little screens, but you have wall-sized screens, huge screens that cover all kinds of information. For example, if you're doing a search, do you want to look at a list or you want to have it displayed in a kind of matrix where you can move things around with your hands, by gesture or even with your eyes. So that kind of technology is around, but it's still fairly in its infancy.

Then finally, we could say that something we all know about if you've ever played a computer game is 3D moving from 2D and to a more 3D environment. Virtual reality kinds of environments where the computer becomes almost like a game environment except it's used for your productivity, for your interaction with a computer and it's customized to your needs. So hopefully within the next 25 years we'll get beyond just the icons, windows and mouse.