The future of the human race

I took two of my children, Julia and Aran with me yesterday when I went to see some folks at Sensorit, a spinoff company of Microsoft France. Sensorit do gesture aware interfaces based on the Microsoft Kinect device most often used on X-Box games platforms but, of course, Kinect is just an input system so using it to recognise hand, arm or even whole body movement as an input stream to control software other than games is a logical step in a logical direction.

Aran is seven years old. He has never seen a telephone with a dial, he has lived all his life in a world that has The Internet and Google, his house is filled with computers and his dad, your's truly, works in an industry that deals in the ultimate abstraction of software architectures and user interfaces. He has had no formal training in the use of computers but he understands the use of a mouse, clicks, double clicks and context clicks. He understands at a fairly deep level that a progress bar shows a position on a time-line. certainly, he understands it well enough to put himself back where he left off in an on-demand program or video on You Tube. 

Sensorit have just created an interactive map of Paris that can be navigated by simple gestures. Zooming, scrolling, selecting and so-on can be accomplished using body gestures with arms and hands. This was effectively exactly what was so stunningly amazing about the first sequences of the film Minority Report. Interaction with a computer using a mixture of voice and gesture to sort through and select data from a visual database.

Within a few minutes Aran had gleaned all he needed to know from the system to begin to interact with it. Interestingly, the engineers said that Aran did all the things that an adult would do and made them think more deeply about the interface and its possible shortcomings. Using this system Aran was able to "fly" over the map, scrolling and selecting areas for deeper study, zooming in and out to get greater or lesser detail as needed. He didn't need a course in computer interfaces, it just happened.

Children born today will grow up in a world that has a Higgs Boson. They will probably have a quantum computer in their pocket where we carry a smart-phone. Their phones might be really smart, like Siri but with true intelligence and a real personality. Their cars will drive themselves so teen-agers won't have to die in stupid drunk-driving accidents. One thing is for sure. There's no going back from here.