Human-Computer Interactions

[casper3699]

Originally posted by Wizeman

By "come out of the box," I mean that we would no longer be able to stereotype a computer as a beige (or whatever style happens to be trendy) box and a monitor, but instead see computers as augmentations of the objects we use everyday. For instance, instead of using Photoshop running on your PC using today's desktop metaphore, maybe Photoshop would be integrated into a multi-purpose easel that would allow you to paint, or draw as people do today, but with the added features of digital photo editing (don't knitpick this; I don't know how it'd be done, I'm just trying to give an example of morphing computers and everyday objects).

My college has stuff like that. You can touch the black board with your finger or a special marker and it will draw or write on the screen. It uses a projecter and a touch activated black board. It also has DVD, CD, movie, with it.

Oh, you really touched an interesting topic here About a year ago, someone from Philips (you know, the lightbulbs and screwdrivers-factory) lectured at my university, he was talking about these kind of interactions too. Remember the film "Total Recall" (with Schwarzenegger)? If you remember the first few minutes of the film, when Quaid (Arnie) sits at home (eating breakfast, if I remember correctly), you see one of the walls displaying some sort of television-set, where he and his wife are watching the news. After that, the complete wall changes to a mountain-scenery. Later on, when they get outside, you see that the house is build in some city.

That wall changing part sounds just like "Antitrust" too. When you walk into the room then the screen detects your mood and changes to some preprogramed pictures and dispplays them on the wall.

[Wizeman]

My college has stuff like that. You can touch the black board with your finger or a special marker and it will draw or write on the screen. It uses a projecter and a touch activated black board. It also has DVD, CD, movie, with it.

I've seen these too. One of my clients has this to work on their CAD projects and do teleconferencing. Unfortunately, this isn't really what I was talking about. What I meant, was that this wouldn't be used to just interface with a computer, or become a peripheral, but instead to become its own sort of "computer." My point is that I believe that computers will stop being computers in the sense that our society now sees them as, but instead computers will become augmentations to objects that we use everyday, so that we won't necessarily have to learn how to use computers (window, unix, whatever OS), we can just use the objects as we have always done, and the functionality that we normally attribute to computers would be inherent.

Regards,
Wizeman