This is the future. Sure it was the future from 3 months ago, but whatever. Watch the whole thing! From the transcript:
But many of you argue, actually, that all of our work is not only about physical objects. We actually do lots of accounting and paper editing and all those kinds of things; what about that? And many of you are excited about the next generation tablet computers to come out in the market. So, rather than waiting for that, I actually made my own, just using a piece of paper. So, what I did here is remove the camera – All the webcam cameras have a microphone inside the camera. I removed the microphone from that, and then just pinched that – like I just made a clip out of the microphone – and clipped that to a piece of paper, any paper that you found around. So now the sound of the touch is getting me when exactly I’m touching the paper. But the camera is actually tracking where my fingers are moving.
The largest physical part of almost every device that humans interact with nowadays is the interface. Laptops are physically dominated by their keyboard and screen. Phones are dominated by the screen and keypad. Look how tiny the Shuffle is — it has no interface. You could set it in your palm and barely notice you were holding it.
This is going to be one of the biggest changes that you’ll be able to see in the world around you — the abolition of the physical interface. Everyone can see the trend for collapsing all our devices down to one –at some point we all know that we’ll have 1 device for email, internet, voice, video, text, messaging, writing and everything else. But what’s holding this back is the interfaces. There is absolutely no reason that a device the size of the iPhone could not be designed to run a fully functional multitasking (unlike the new iPad) operating system that handled everything your desktop or laptop (or netbook) does. The problem is the interface. Can you imagine writing a paper on your iPhone? Even watching a movie or video on a phone sized device is pretty underwhelming, at least until I saw those projector-phone attachments.
But devices and software like Mistry’s above point the way around these problems: completely dissolve the interface. Project the visual input against any surface (and perhaps shortly, onto glasses, or using hologram technology, into the air in front of us) and abstract the tactile interface. Mistry offers a perfect example in his video — the mouse. With the (now old fashioned) advent of the optical mouse, there is no reason you actually need a physical device. You could simply put an accelerometer into a glove or one of Mistry’s fingertip marker caps, or attach one of the tiny optical mouse cameras, or at some point in the future, as a tiny implant in your finger bones. Add a wireless connection that greedily connects to any wireless-enabled device (i.e. all of them) and voila — you have a completely portable mouse. Mice don’t even really provide any tactile feedback, unlike a keyboard, so we’re not losing a thing — we had a system that detected small hand motions and we’ve simply stripped away all the chaff.
Next up — the keyboard. This becomes trivial with Mistry’s marker caps, or something like this, or even if you’re old fashioned, tiny inserts in your jeans that sit on the tops of your thighs and detect you tapping away.
So we’ve got the mouse and the keyboard. Audio’s easy, everyone has those little bluetooth earpieces. Mistry’s talk shows us the projection screen which can go on any surface. We can shortly imagine projecting this onto the inner surface of a special pair of glasses as well, for more privacy. So what part of a computer is left? All the boring tiny bits, which become smaller, faster and cheaper every year. It’s easy to imagine fitting them into a pocket and letting them wirelessly connect to all the interface devices. So — what does this let us do?
Misty has seen some of the best applications already (watch the talk all the way through) — who needs a kindle when you can just project the ebook on any surface? Everyone wants the ability to put notes or doodles on their book — now you can, just wave your finger about in the path of the projected page. The part where it scans the product at the store is beautiful too — ideally you’d have a pop-up that tells you that it was cheaper at the place across the street (or even more likely, from an online source), or gives customer reviews, or links to Underwriter’s or Consumer Reports on the product.
He also hits a home-run with the virtual post it notes. Except instead of just post-it notes to yourself that you can put anywhere and transfer to/from any device, you can upload it to a virtual-post-it network and leave virtual graffiti anywhere you want, visible to whoever you want to let see it. The applications of this are really endless — imagine being able to leave notes anywhere — ” don’t order the halibut at this restaurant.” ”This was where Edgar Allen Poe wrote his most famous book.” ”Watch out, there are lots of potholes on the next road.” Or heck, you could attach them to certain people (no doubt there is a possibility of abuse here) and let people know “this loser doesn’t tip.” I imagine it won’t be long until someone redirects their twitter feed into hovering clumps of 140 character clouds.
What about cameras? Watch for the “take a picture” with your hands scene too — absolutely amazing. My one beef is where he shows “pinching” files from your portable device to your desktop, where it appears on his… old fashioned display screen. That’s pretty damn cool, but what’s the point of a desktop machine at all? Carry everything in your portable device and just display it on a blank space where your desktop monitor used to be. Why ever sit down at a desk again? The only reason we had those in the first place was as a place to store your files and your computer. Also, I laughed when he clicked “print” on his “paper pc.” What? Why not send it by carrier pigeon too, just to complete the archaic media loop?
This is the future: where interfaces become transparent and the tiny hidden computers augment and improve the reality we see around us in intuitive ways. So, people who are smarter and more talented than me: get to work! I want to be able to buy all this cool stuff, pronto.
