The Future: We can nearly touch it
I have been thinking about what direction Microsoft will be heading in over the next few years and there one thing that stood out for me that could be amazing and that was the direction that Microsoft’s user experience might be going in.
When looking at the future of Microsoft its hard to ignore the XBox and Project Natal and how it will change the way people interactive with the XBox. A lot of people have also spoken to great lengths about Natal for the XBox so I wont talk about it on the console but how it could might be coming to a PC and how it might be applied. There are several applications that could benefit from the touch-less (seems odd to say that seeing as we have only just got touch on Windows 7) control such as media displays with photos, music and films if you wanted to pause them or skip to the next picture, track or scene. Even viewing documents would be nice to sit back and just scroll by just waving your hands in front of the screen. There are obviously cases where touch-less control would be of limited use such as when editing documents with Office, although PowerPoint may benefit from the freeness of touch-less control.
But then I got thinking, what if a projector and the Natal camera is connected to a PC then you can turn any surface into an interactive display. This would be a much cheaper way than buying a Surface or interactive board. I am sure there would be applications for this anywhere from a bedroom to a boardroom and all the way to a shop floor.
Why I think this could be excellent and one of Microsoft’s aims is because of all the work they have been putting in to their Surface table which as of yet I see nothing to really entice consumers to buy it, it is good for marketing and retail though. Multi-Touch ouch has now properly come to Windows 7 and a few of the Surface applications have been ported over to the OS in the Windows 7 Touch Pack but again I don’t see much to gain from the touch capability. However if the touch has been added to prove it works and get people familiar with it for the arrival of the next generation of “touch” which could have a real purpose then maybe its support in Windows 7 does seem to have a reason.
I can just imagine having a wall in my room that I can interact with from the other side of the room, whether it be when viewing images, to browsing the web (requires a wireless keyboard I guess), to re-enacting Minority Report scenes.
Natal has been often rumoured to be coming to the XBox late 2010 and I expect that it wont be coming to PCs before that date so maybe we will be looking at Windows 8 for official support for Natal on a PC but I am sure I can wait that long. After a few years it might even be small enough and light enough to be put on Windows Phones and the Zune, even better would be if micro-projectors had matured by that time.
So maybe for the first time I don’t want to touch the future.
EDIT: Maybe a bit like “Sixth Sense“; thanks to @iBiryukov for the link
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Natal: Uniting the Three Screens? « My Microsoft Life (Dec 24, 2009)
[...] months months back I wrote a post about how I could see the Xbox’s Project Natal working well on PCs when combined with a projector, think Minority report. Since then I have been wondering what other [...]