Science fiction movies have always been the most inventive about portraying different ways to control our computers in the future. From Minority Report to Johnny Mnemonic, wacky futuristic interfaces have graced the big screen for years. Lately, more and more corporate entities are getting into the future interface prediction game. Harkening back to Apple’s 1987 Knowledge Navigator video, both Microsoft and RIM are envisioning computing’s future, but are those visions compelling? What does the future look like?

More than Multitouch

Both Microsoft and RIM’s future-oriented videos heavily feature multi-touch, glass interfaces. Cribbing heavily from Apple’s successful present with the iPad, both companies extrapolate a future where every surface is multi-touch, and displays are built into every piece of glass imaginable. Better be careful how you clean that bathroom mirror!

RIM does a better job than Microsoft of showing how things will actually be controlled with a a clear, if not dense, layer of menus that looks like BlackBerry OS on steroids. Pretty it ain’t — but it beats Microsoft’s frenetic, unlabelled, “tap and hope” interface of the future where tapping a piece of glass seems to have a different effect each time. Both of these futures borrow too heavily from the present to really represent true breakthroughs.

Talk to Me

Apple has taken the lead in the world of mass-market voice-controlled computing. Android’s Voice Actions are highly useful, but the natural language capabilities of Siri, and the ever-expanding database of things we expect her to do will make voice-based computing a compelling interface for a lot of computer-based tasks. The “computer as assistant” metaphor becomes far more likely when you can talk to your computer like you would another human, and have it figure out what you want. Will Siri make mistakes? Don’t humans? And with time Siri (and other voice-based assistants, you know they’re coming) will get better to the point that its “good enough” for the majority of computer users. This won’t replace traditional ways of interacting with computers, but it will change the way we do a lot of basic every day computing.

Wave Your Hands in the Air Like You Don’t Care

The one computer interface that always generates the most excitement is the gesture-based interface used in Minority Report. While this kind of computer control is exciting, it’s very telling that Tom Cruise had to take extensive breaks between takes because his arms became tired from all that waving. Does this mean that gestures controls will never take off? No, but I think they will be a niche computing interface for applications where they make sense. Think of surgeons manipulating images in the operating room without scrubbing out, or dimming the lights in an auditorium by lowering your hand. Gestures may not end up everywhere, but they will definitely be a part of our future computing controls.

Wrap Up

We use computers for so many things in our life nowadays, and the ways in which we interact with them have a profound impact on how we live our lives. The future will likely hold many surprises for computer control (mind control anyone? biotic implants?) but one thing that for certain is that whatever comes next will likely only take off if it is elegant in a way we didn’t anticipate, and useful in ways we can’t imagine.