What the post-smartphone era will bring to the future
The camera and microphones in computing devices are likely to be
the new mouse and keyboard
Each new era of computing has brought with it a big change to
how we interact wit h ou r devices.PCs ditched the punch card and gave us the
mouse and keyboard.Smartphones got rid of the mouse and physical keyboard in
favour of multi-touch screens.
Get ready for touchscreens to fall out of favour soon too, as we
enter the post-smartphone era.This period is likely to be dominated by everyday
gadgets like speakers, eyeglasses, and even toasters that have been made
`smart' with powerful computing chips, wireless communications radios, and
sensors.
The good news is you may already be prepared for the change. If
you have ever sent your significant other a picture to make sure that you
picked up the right cereal or used Siri to answer a text while you were
cooking, you've already taken some early steps into the postsmartphone world.
LISTENING
AND TALKING
Microphones and cameras have a lot of appeal as interfaces for
computers, because they tap into the human brain's natural modes of
communication, says John Underkoffler, an award-winning computer interface
designer who helped envision the computing systems in Minority Report and the
Iron Man films.
Smarter, cheap er microphones and cameras will allow us to have
more natural in teractions with more and more of our devices.
And they will allow us to do things that just weren't possible
before.You can hold your phone's camera up to a sign in a foreign country and
the app will show you what it means. Microphones and cameras are “going to be
part of a new wave of user interface that's going to redefine what computing
means,“ Underkoffler says.
SMARTER
EVERYTHING
A great early example of how we'll be using cameras and
microphones to interact with post-smartphone devices is Amazon's Echo Show. The
Show is a smart speaker that's powered by Alexa, Amazon's voice assistant, and
has a screen. Its display has a touchscreen, so you can tap on virtual buttons
and commands.
But that's not how you'll likely use it most of the time.
Instead, its primary interfaces are through its microphone and cameras. If you
want to see if Amazon has your shampoo in stock, you can use the Show's camera
to scan an old bottle, identify it, and find it in the store.
POST-SMARTPHONE
OUTLOOK
But the Show offers only a taste of what's to come in terms of
how we interact with post-smartphone devices. A sophisticated vision comes in
the form of Microsoft's HoloLens.
The augmented reality headset uses a camera, mounted on its
side, to `read' the world around you and help shape the digital images it
displays. And because it has a microphone, it will also respond to voice commands.
Even though cameras and microphones are coming to the fore,
touchscreens likely won't disappear. We'll still need them in some situations,
just like we still use keyboards and mouse today.
businessinsider.in
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