As shown in the movie Minority Report, Multi-Touch UI is the future (see photos).
The keyboard/mouse paradigm will be around for a while but a future of free form 3D multi-point input is coming. When it happens it will be the first step towards conversational interactions.
Please see Jeff Han’s interface-free multi-sensor device presentation here. Some more info is here.
As Jeff Han notes, the interesting aspects of the technology is the ‘state of the art’ mesh and data visualization algorithms used to pull it off.
I’ll try to resurrect some Michael Abrash image Morph mesh code that I implemented back in 1993 in a future post.
At the time, I was using a PC with an Intel 80386SX CPU. The 386SX CPU had no math coprocessor which meant that the execution time of the image morph mesh calculations was much longer than expected.
I remember that the time needed to generate 20 images was approximately 2 hours.
DB Tech Revolution 