The traditional way of interacting with computers is changing. The mouse and desktop metaphor was invented in the 70s and now with advances in input techniques, such as touch and motion sensing, we are seeing new types of interaction with computers. Smart phones have touch interfaces and the newly released iPad is bringing touch hand-held computers. Microsoft has released Surface and will release project Natal later this year. The field of Human-Computer Interaction or HCI is getting very interesting.
Thomas Hahn wrote a paper on HCI as part of my New Technology course. In this paper he addresses some of the current trends such as touch, motion control and speech recognition.
This is from the abstract:
Human Computer Interaction in the field of input and output techniques has developed a lot of new techniques over the last few years. With the recently released full multi-touch tablets and notebooks the way how people interact with the computer is coming to a new dimension. As humans are used to handle things with their hands the technology of multi-touch displays or touchpad’s brought much more convenience for use in daily life. But for sure the usage of human speech recognition will also play an important part in the future of human computer interaction. This paper introduces techniques and devices using the humans hand gestures for the use with multi-touch tablets and video recognition and techniques for voice interaction. Thereby the gesture and speech recognition take an important role as these are the main communication methods between humans and how they could disrupt the keyboard or mouse as we know it today.
The paper is here: Future Human Computer Interaction with special focus on input and output techniques