Where once we were accustomed to clicking, typing, and pressing down against sturdy buttons to communicate our wills to machines, the iPod popularized the concept of swiping left or right on a circle to select the music you wanted to listen to. Touchscreen smartphones entered the market shortly after that, introducing a range of other tactile command prompts like the poke to simulate pressing a button , the pinch to zoom in and out , the press, hold and drag.
These tactile commands gained traction quickly among the public for a number of reasons: They were new. All the cool famous kids were doing it. Touchscreen technology became cheap and mainstream.
But most of all, the movements felt intuitive, natural. That's what good computer UI is all about: Building more natural ways to engage with software and devices. And that's the core principle that will guide the future UI devices you're about to learn about. As of , smartphones have replaced standard mobile phones in much of the developed world. This means a large portion of the world is now familiar with the various tactile commands mentioned above.
Through apps and games, smartphone users have learned a large variety of abstract skills to control the relative supercomputers sitting in their pockets. It's these skills that will prepare consumers for the next wave of devices—devices that will allow us to more easily merge the digital world with our real-world environments.
So let's take a look at some of the tools we'll use to navigate our future world. Open-air gesture control. We still poke, pinch, and swipe our way through our mobile lives.
But that touch control is slowly giving way to a form of open-air gesture control. For the gamers out there, your first interaction with this may have been playing overactive Nintendo Wii games or the Xbox Kinect games—both consoles use advanced motion-capture technology to match player movements with game avatars.
Well, this tech isn't staying confined to video games and green screen filmmaking, it will soon enter the broader consumer electronics market. One striking example of what this might look like is a Google venture named Project Soli watch its amazing and short demo video here. Developers of this project use miniature radar to track the fine movements of your hand and fingers to simulate the poke, pinch, and swipe in open-air instead of against a screen.
This is the kind of tech that will help make wearables easier to use, and thus more attractive to a wider audience. Three-dimensional interface. Taking this open-air gesture control further along its natural progression, by the mids, we may see the traditional desktop interface—the trusty keyboard and mouse—slowly replaced by the gesture interface, in the same style popularized by the movie, Minority Report. In fact, John Underkoffler, UI researcher, science advisor, and inventor of the holographic gesture interface scenes from Minority Report, is currently working on the real-life version —a technology he refers to as a human-machine interface spatial operating environment.
He'll probably need to come up a handy acronym for that. Using this technology, you will one day sit or stand in front of a large display and use various hand gestures to command your computer. Haptic holograms. What these projections all have in common is that if you reached out to grab them, you would only get a handful of air.
New technologies see examples: one and two are being developed to create holograms you can touch or at least mimic the sensation of touch, i. Depending on the technique used, be it ultrasonic waves or plasma projection, haptic holograms will open up an entirely new industry of digital products that we can use in the real world.
This technology is what will mainstream the Minority Report open-air interface and possibly end the age of the traditional desktop. Imagine this: Instead of carrying around a bulky laptop, you could one day carry a small square wafer maybe the size of a thin external hard drive that would project a touchable display screen and keyboard hologram.
Taken one step further, imagine an office with only a desk and a chair, then with a simple voice command, an entire office projects itself around you—a holographic workstation, wall decorations, plants, etc. Shopping for furniture or decoration in the future may involve a visit to the app store along with a visit to Ikea.
Tim Bajarin is recognized as one of the leading industry consultants, analysts and futurists, covering the field of personal computers and consumer technology. Bajarin is the President of Creative Strategies, Inc and has been with the company since where he has served as a consultant providing analysis to most of the leading hardware and software vendors in the industry. Contact us at letters time.
By Tim Bajarin. Related Stories. The 25 Defining Works of the Black Renaissance. Already a print subscriber? Often it takes a little while to get used to using a new type of mouse and can feel a little clumsy at first. Ergonomic mice often come in left- and right-handed orientations and in different sizes, to ensure the mouse fits comfortably. Adjustable Ergonomic mice are hinged along one side and allow for the mouse to alternate between a flatter more traditional position and the vertical, this encourages a variable wrist position and can help move from a normal mouse to a vertical.
The position of the bar allows it to be operated with your thumbs and keeps your hands on or close to the keyboard. Trackball , trackerball or rollerball mice remain stationary with the cursor controlled by rolling a ball with thumb, fingers or palm. This means there is little to no wrist movement. Larger trackball mice are easy to use and may be particularly helpful for users who lack fine motor skills, including people with learning difficulties, tremors or arthritis.
Also, like the BIG track mouse with switches shown here, they can be strong and are often suitable for being operated by elbows or feet. Pen mice are held in the hand like a pen. Left and right click buttons are vertical on the pen shaft.
Graphics tablets these require a specialist tablet to write on, but the pens they use are more pen-like than pen mice and generally more comfortable to hold. Graphics tablets tend to be more geared towards design than ergonomics. Joysticks work in a similar manner to the controls on an electric wheelchair, with the joystick position determining the direction and speed of the mouse pointer.
Additional buttons on the joystick can operate left, right and double clicks, as well as other common shortcuts such as cut and paste. Touchscreens use sensors in the screen to track movement and selections and are a very direct method of interacting with your device. Tablets and smartphones use touchscreens as well as many laptops.
Touchscreen monitors are also available for use with desktop computers. Head movement tracking uses head movement to control the cursor. This can be done with a wearable device like the headset in the picture or using a camera.
Selections are made using a switch that can be controlled by a puff or bite the blue bulb in the picture. Eye tracking systems track eye movement, using it to plot the position of the cursor on the screen.
This can be used to control programmes as well as to type when used with the on-screen keyboard. Tracking eye movement means that the cursor does not need to be driven around the screen and so is typically much faster than head movement tracking. Although initially designed for use by people with very limited movement, eye tracking hardware and software is now relatively inexpensive and can present an interesting alternative for people experiencing temporary or situational disabilities; for example, a parent could hold their baby and still be able to interact with their computer.
Foot mouse systems are typically designed to use both feet. One foot controls the cursor using a slip-on puck on a mat. The other foot controls switches, often with single and double click or other options controlled by separate buttons. It is important to have your screen positioned at a comfortable level to minimise bad posture and the risk of injury.
We recommend your screen is directly in front of you so you do not have to twist your body and should be approximately an arms-length away with the top of the screen roughly level with your eyes. Other equipment such as monitor-raisers and monitor arms allow you to raise the height of a screen. Laptop stands can also be helpful but may require you to have a separate keyboard and mouse. Tablets can also be mounted on flexible arms viewing comfort, but this is not always practical, as they are normally controlled with the touchscreen.
A lap tray can allow you to use a tablet or laptop comfortably on your lap and provides a flat, stable surface on one side and a beanbag on the underside that moulds to the shape of your legs. Windows has had native support for USB mice and keyboards at least as far back as Windows 98, I wouldn't bet on '95 as all the USB support was sketchy.
So, what's the big deal about installing a USB adapter that I did a whole page about it? Try it when the laptop CD drive has failed:- The CD drive on my notebook went south over a year ago and I never got around to replacing it because I figured with a failing keyboard and mouse, I should be looking for a new notebook.
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