If Gates is right, how much longer for keyboards & mice?
It wasn't exactly Minority Report but Bill Gates' technology demonstration at the company's CEO Summit earlier Wednesday may be remembered years from now as a harbinger of the end for the keyboard and mouse era. Not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But soon enough. (Cue Winston Churchill here about how this is not the end, the beginning of the end, but perhaps, it's the end of the beginning.)
As Gates demoed a 4-foot-by-6-foot prototype called TouchWall, there was little resemblance to Tom Cruise's futuristic data juggling in that 2002 sci-fi performance as he moved 3D screens around with simple hand gestures. Making what is likely his last appearance as master of ceremonies at this annual conclave of corporate heavy hitters, Gates used the show-and-tell session to offer a prediction.
(Credit:
CNET News.com)
In the future, he said, all surfaces will feature "an inexpensive screen display capability and software that sees what you're doing there so that it's completely interactive."
I've been watching Gates give performances like these since 1985 and it's wise to treat his predictions with the appropriate grain of salt. When it comes to Microsoft, the concept of vaporware is not entirely foreign. Still, I found the demo interesting when you consider the topic against the backdrop of what Microsoft is developing in Windows 7. In fact, a couple of months ago, Gates hinted at future support for touch-based gestures and speech recognition in a the post-Vista OS.
"The likelihood is that touch will become mainstream on certain form factors very quickly because we are working hand-in-hand with the hardware companies," he told my colleague Ina Fried.
I'll wait to see how Microsoft's product roadmap evolves before getting too exciting. Planned features for operating systems often don't make the final scratch because of various and sundry. For his part, Gates appears confident this is the future direction of man-machine relations. In a practiced sales pitch for the TouchWall, Gates predicted that home and office walls eventually will become computers. Period.
Of course, that's also going to require a lot of infrared cameras to pick up touch patterns as well as projection technology--and that's all going to cost. (For the foreseeable future, touch sensitive walls remain a toy for the plutocrats. Last Christmas, Nieman Marcus was selling Jeff Han's Interactive Media Wall for $100,000.
On the other side of the equation, these sorts of technologies are moving into the mainstream in fits and starts. Vista includes some support for touch sensitivity and millions of iPhone owners now see gestures as natural. The fact is that we are getting beyond the keyboard and mouse as the end-all and be-all. The mouse is more than 40 years old, while the idea for the QWERTY keyboard dates back to a Civil War era invention by C.L. Sholes. Don't know about you but I'm ready for a change.
Charles Cooper has covered technology and business for more than 25 years. Before joining CNET News, he worked at the Associated Press, Computer & Software News, Computer Shopper, PC Week, and ZDNet. E-mail Charlie. 
1. Writing code: Imagine speaking Java source to a text editor.
2. I can type faster than I can speak clearly enough for dictation software to interpret me accurately.
3. You would not want to have 100 people in an open office speaking their email replies.
The ultimate interface will direct brain-thought-to-computer for both text entry as well as programmatic manipulation. My guess is that we're still 25+ years from seeing that reality.
-jason
Besides, the old Nintendo Powerglove is still the closest thing to Minority Report IMHO.
Seriously, I don't want to touch the wall. Touch in a way has come and gone, except for portable devices, but nobody knows it yet. Why walk up to it and touch it when I could interact with it Wii style from across the room or close up. Best of both worlds. The tech is already there we just have to wait for people to see how it can be used outside of a game system.
We invented the remote control how long ago? Now what, you want me to walk up to it? What's the surface for? A giant touch coffee table? All the while other people have iPhones. The same tech in a shirt pocket. The idea has come and gone. MS is just trying to play catch-up.
Why don't they understand that computers get smaller? They have always gotten smaller. Why does MS keep think they're going to bigger or house sized? They already were. Now they fit in your pocket. That's the future. Hide it away when you don't need it. Pull it out when you do. Like an appliance. Coffee pots were high tech once, but I wouldn't one house sized. I don't want a house sized Internet either. When I get bored I just want to shut it off and put it away.
People are not replacing typing with speaking - people are replacing speaking with typing.
Just think about the workd "texting". Instead of making a phone call, people would rather SMS a dozen rounds, even though the keys are tiny and awkward.
Is BG saying that people should just "type" SMS by speaking? Why? If people want to speak, they would dial the number. It is called a phone call.
What if there were 5 or 10 people all working on computers in the same office? That's going to get pretty loud. What if your spouse is trying to watch TV? How many minutes do you think you have before they bite your head off? Wait until your OS crashes and you have no keyboard or mouse. How do you plan to reinstall the speech software? How would you click the EULA?
Speech, really cool on paper until you find out the computer is just as dumb as before. Yeah, you can tell it what to do, but you have to tell it what to do. That's the problem.
AI and speech need to be paired, but all that would give me is just a good old fashion employee. We already have those. It'd just be made of metal is all and maybe cheaper. Not really something the world hasn't seen before.
Voice is a tool. It is true that talking to a GPS unit while driving to get directions is easier, but that's just because you're using the right tool for the job. It still isn't right for every job.
The author seems to want change for the sake of change - get real.
I can see the mouse being replaced with touch but the surface that we touch will need to be horizontal rather than vertical for comfort. Given this we'll continue to require 2 planes - one vertical plane for a viewing surface, and one horizontal plane for controls. A single plane for both viewing and control either makes it uncomfortable for control or viewing for extended periods, although it would be fine for short bursts.
The reason the M$ keeps showing big ass tables and giant wall computers is that they don't have the technology to make these things small. They can't. The nature of how they work demands large, very large format.
There is absolutely no way to miniaturize this approach. The resolution of the gestures cannot be fine enough. And just exactly where would you put all those motion sensors on a 5" X 3" device?
Gates is hardly credible enough for you to use as proof, since he has never correctly predicted anything in technology.
He was wrong on WebTV....
MSN burying AOL...
Yahoo...
And investments...
Article: Bill's billions dwindle in Q1
Massive fines and online competition hit Microsoft profits
By Our financial correspondent, Euros Pound: Friday, 25 April 2008, 6:59 AM
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/04/25/bill-billions-dwindle-q1
2. When people say "I type faster than I talk," what they might mean is that hearing themselves talk distracts them from their thoughts, while typing does not (or less so). They might not have any problem if the speech didn't need to be aloud. Also, they might mean "I type code faster than I can talk code," but that might change if text-to-speech engines were designed specifically for coding specific languages. (\begin rant\ Of course, that will never happen as long as we keep allowing brand new coding languages to crop up and supercede all their perfectly-good predecessors every 6 months! \end rant\)
But I have to tell you that we do have customers who want it "the way it has been for 40 years" and we give it to them. My prediction is that advanced interface will come creeping slowly as the young and young at mind embrace not just the possibility, but the real and immediate benefits. And pretty soon will not buy anything that doesn't look and feel "like that".
I was blown away by the IPhone user interface and whole idea. The fact that the IPhone is threatening to do to the mobile phone business what ITunes did to the music business has nothing to do with how clear the telephone is -- It is totally the human interface. Pay attention or go out of business. Hey investors -- you listening to this? Innovation rules!
Forget the grain of salt, on this one, Mr. Gates is a pessimist -- We will be doing lots more than even he thinks with the technologies like OLED, powerful embedded processors and inventive development environments.