Fuelled by this week’s MSc “home­work”, I have been engaged in quite a few con­ver­sa­tions about innov­a­tions and near-future tech­no­logy. What I found was that is becom­ing more and more com­mon­place to find tech­no­logy in the real world that fea­tured in science-fiction stor­ies. What is scary, how­ever, is how fast the pre­di­citions in fic­tion are becom­ing true (per­haps there is a need to re-write Moore’s Law to reflect this?). In this first part of a series of my take on real-world use of fant­astic tech­no­logy I am look­ing at the Ges­ture User Inter­face — trail-blazed by Apple’s iPod Touch, iPhone and, most recently, the iPad.

Although it requires phys­ical con­tact from the user it is very sim­ilar in concept to the inter­face used in the 2002 file Minor­ity Report. In fact, Minor­ity Report has spawned a whole raft of inspired tech­no­logy (some of which I will talk about in future blogs). Not sur­pris­ing, given that many of final ideas presen­ted in the film were the res­ult of a two-day dis­cus­sion held with people from MIT’s Media Lab, amongst oth­ers. The G-Speak inter­face from Oblong Indus­tries (see video below) is an even more excit­ing form of this tech­no­logy and is dir­ectly inspired from the film.

Con­sider the gam­ing industry as well. The Wii uses spa­tial rela­tion­ship detec­tion between the user and the device to great effect (although you can cheat in the jog­ging game on Wii­Fit by sit­ting on the sofa eat­ing pizza and just wav­ing the Wiimote around); then you have the “wand” or “Play­Sta­tion Arc” con­trol­ler in devel­op­ment for the PS3, as well as the Eye Pet and the upcom­ing Pro­ject Natal for the Xbox 360. The use of such con­trol­lers has made entry into the gam­ing world more access­ible to those who are daun­ted by the usual com­bin­a­tion of but­tons and triggers.

So con­sider how this type of inter­face would change the way we will inter­act with our com­put­ing device in the future. Will we see the end of the key­board and mouse sooner than we think?