Platypus Farm

Concept design by Jeffrey Engelhardt, via Yanko.

Three Interesting views, from 3 different designers are compared on Fast Company’s post: What Will Trigger the Next Paradigm Shift in Computer Design?

What’s interesting to me is how much of what we currently think of as interface with a computer will disappear when everyone gets very comfortable with the notion of ‘their stuff’ being everywhere at all times.

My computing devices don’t talk to each other that well, yet. And that requires me to log in to many places, sync-up various devices and push content around. But putting the bulk of ‘my stuff’ in the cloud will be just one more barrier removed. There are many more barriers. Being forced to register with everything is one pesky problem. The formatting specific to each device is another. And then there is the way we might interact with content once they’re not so bound to the physical devices they’re used in.

What will make folks become less concerned about keeping their content locally, are common services like Netflix. Being able to watch movies in my cue instantly, is a great continence. It also further reduces the need for thinking of it as a physical process. And soon you’ll have a much larger list of devices, including TV’s, that Netflix for example will serve the movies to directly. These types of conveniences will let us forget that there is a computer involved at all.

What I wonder is: will the interaction be dramatically different according to device? Or will there be some common experiences? It’s fairly obvious that a desktop computer can’t benefit too much from multi-touch concept. So the iPhone interaction won’t work for every situation. And we know that the remote control is much simpler, with only some pre-set keys and basic directional controls (up, down, left and right). So are we going start seeing more Wii-like interfaces? Are there going to be common gestures that become a form of language used to interact with many devices? Or as the content becomes free of the hard drive, we’ll see a greater variety of ways to interact with that content?

There are so many new toys and so many exciting new ways to interact with them. But lets forget the Minority Report looking interaction based on a stationary computer. Why not take it with you. That’s exactly what the MIT students are experimenting with here:

Some additional reading:
Apple patent attack: the multi-touch gesture dictionary
Interface Controlled by Hand Gestures
Wii-Gesture Control for Robots