Getting Back to the Original Pointing Device

Smashing Magazine is a great site that frequently provides inspiration and illumination about all things design (and technology design in particular). I stumbled across the site a couple years ago and I'm always impressed with the quality of inspiration they provide.

They recently put together "10 Futuristic User Interfaces," a look at where user interfaces might go in the not-too-distant future. Interestingly, a lot of the interfaces point (no pun intended) to heavy use of the original pointing device: the finger. Of particular note are the interfaces for Futuristic Glass, Motorola Sparrow, Composition of the table, and Ringo. All of these interfaces rely primarily on hand-based motor skills to grab and manipulate information in a meaningful way.

Pointing as the primary means of communication isn't exactly new, or futuristic. We can see lots of implementations of "touch" devices in use today. Microsoft has Surface and its various, manufactured-real-soon now incarnations. There's the Wii. There's a number of new multi-touch computers, including the well-advertised one from HP. And there's the iPhone. A combination of devices are making touch-based interaction (computing) a reality.

My question, though, is this: will people forgo a century or more of developed typing skills for a touch-based interface. Touch-based interfaces are largely serial input devices. You can't type more than one letter at a time on the iPhone. Multiple touches signifies a single, special action in multi-touch interfaces. I suppose you could make the argument, however, that keyboards work the same way: a machine only accepts one key as input at at time. However, keyboards are fast. You can use all 10 pointing devices on your hands at an incredibly rapid rate to generate input. Touch devices expect that you'll be using a single input . Given the range of motion required for or the limited space available in touch interfaces, it's nearly impossible, at this point, to provide input at the same rate as a keyboard. A common complaint that Blackberry device users have about the iPhone is that it's much slower to create responses/entries on the iPhone than it is on the Blackberry because of the keyboard and because you're able to provide input at a much faster rate.

This is a problem that time and ingenuity will probably solve. However, the miniaturization of technology prevents a major barrier to rapid input via touch. The average finger size of our species isn't going to get smaller any time soon.

Another major obstacle to input interfaces like Ringo (which is pretty dang cool) is the need for small, inexpensive and completely proliferated holographic projectors. That day is probably coming too, with the march toward technology miniaturization.

So touch input, glass-as-the-computer, and the proliferation of holographic projectors. Maybe Minority Report had it right all along.