Magic Carpet Ride

Human-computer interaction is going to change radically over the next decade.

The rise of featherweight laptops, tablet computers, PDAs, and wearable devices on the one hand, and wall-sized or room-based projection and display systems on the other is even now wrenching apart the Procrustean setup of the desktop workstation, which has forced users to accept what hindsight will reveal to be an almost unbearably constricted and contorted relationship with our computing machinery (while the ongoing pandemic of carpal tunnel syndrome and other repetitive strain injuries offer more immediate and irrefutable bodily evidence).

My fantasy setup of the future might look and feel something like this: a rectangle of thin plastic, perhaps 3 x 4 feet, which I carry around rolled up under my arm. I can unfurl it on any tabletop or flat surface, even the sidewalk. The plastic sheet is actually an LCD screen, with an embedded wireless uplink to the Web: the desktop browser has become a magic carpet. Applications, both local and remote, appear on the screen, like the tiles of a mosaic. I move them about physically, dragging, shrinking, or enlarging them with my hands, pushing and pulling them through the information space. Text entry is primarily by voice recognition. The keyboard, when needed, is a holographic projection coupled to a motion tracker. Data is stored to a miniature hard drive I keep on my keychain.

Science fiction? Hamlet on the holodeck? My magic carpet is just an extrapolation from real-world research that is happening at places like the Tangible Media Group (and elsewhere) in the Media Lab at MIT, the Metaverse Lab at the University of Kentucky, the GVU Center at Georgia Tech, and the Human-Computer Interaction Lab here at the University of Maryland. Not to mention industry.

(Better hold on tight.)