The Limitations of the Mouse
Let's say your pen rolls off your desk during work. What do you do? Well, you certainly wouldn't use a T-Rex grabber, or try to direct The Claw to pick it up for you. You might be surprised to learn, then, that you do this every day.
More and more of our time is spent moving, copying, editing, and transferring files, opening menus, painting, and designing on our computers. But we're limited. We've been trained to communicate with computers through a simple peripheral that allows us to direct a pointer around a 2-dimensional screen. The mouse hasn't changed a whole lot since the 60s. It's time for something new.
Touch screens. These have been around for quite some time, but never really hit it off with humanity until the iPhone. These still aren't commonly found on desktop PCs, but just wait. This technology takes us one step closer to 'physically' working with digital data.
Bendable technology. Up until now, bending our phones, tablets, or computers would break them. Samsung is about to change that. Imagine you had a digital newspaper that shut down when you rolled it up. Or a flashlight app that turned on with a twist. We might finally see that Bop It app we've all been waiting for!
Voice recognition. While I wouldn't drop $100 extra bucks on a phone to get this feature - I can't wait until I can just tell my phone when I want to wake up in the morning. Simple tasks like this are exponentially more difficult when having to flip through menus using a keypad. I'd like to be able to walk into my office and say, “All right, I need you to open Gmail, Illustrator, and Facebook.” Yeah, that would be way easier.
Augmented reality. Yes, my blog posts always seem to come back to this. Augmented reality is going to remove the need for a mediatory device by allowing us to deal with digital data the same way we handle objects in reality. I can't wait for this.
Can you think of more ways we could communicate with our technology? Let me know below!