Of Mice and .... Human Interface Devices?

Martin recently posted about keyboards and some future alternatives ;

I find this a really interesting area of technology

Call it HID (Human Interface Device) or HCI (Human/Computer Interfacing) – where's it all going? I've already opined that the Mouse may be history, but what else is in store?



Well the touch screen has a 3D gesture-processing competitor in the Leap  - that may find  willing users in industrial and other work aplications where it is not practical to use a touch screen.

Then there is the Kinect family of gesture recognition.

For situations where hands-free interfacing is required, eye scanning interfaces may be the answer 

Google Glasses

In a paper that touched on the whole gamut of user interfaces in the specific area of Wearable Computers, Lehikoinen (2002) observed that “Vision is a very efficient sense when it comes to receiving information. Therefore, it is natural to use a display as an output device in computing” Indeed we can usually take on visual information several times faster than it can be spoken and understood. Also,  voice human-computer dialogue risks being both noisy and non-private. So the video screen wins as output device, possibly as something like Google Glasses

This does not exclude audio from all practical use, however, because it is clear that in humans, both sending and receiving voice communications can be carried on to some extent alongside receiving computer video output, allowing at least some degree of multitasking. For example, I can listen to my "better half" while I blog! Voice to computer input is also faster than typing, and again we can do it in parallel with other activities. We can use voice simply for commands,  or go further, into dictation of typed information. So in the appropriate environment, voice input and output is an attractive option.

The obvious answer when faced with the choice is: we'll have all of them, please! So we can use whatever communication is appropriate for the moment and task at hand.  ( or eye! )