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A new type of interface is going to change the way we interact with machines radically
Around the globe, engineers and scientists are working on fundamentally new interfaces for communicating with electronic devices like phones and computers. They will radically change the way we communicate with our little helpers, that have become ubiquitous. But before we go into the future, let’s take a brief look back.
Every computer — and a modern smartphone is nothing else than a portable computer — needs to communicate with us. Data has to be put in, and the results have to be brought back if a device does anything meaningful for us. The first computers got their input from punched cards (or even celluloid film) and disgorged the results of their work as hardly readable patterns of lamps. A few years later, tube monitors were used for that, and magnetic tapes allowed the storage of much more data. Then for decades, we used keyboards (and from the 80s on a mouse) for the input and monitors or printers for output.
The development of reliable and cheap touchscreens has brought input and output physically together. Thus, the interaction between user and computer has become more natural. We touch something and get a response, which is more in line with our everyday experience than pressing a key and expecting to affect something else.
