With so much focus placed on smartphones, touch and gesture control and their evolution, what will be the next big development in how people use digital devices?
The way we use digital devices has become big news.
People spend so much time looking at a screen each day that every new update to any major operating system is greeted with a near hysteria about whether you should or shouldn’t upgrade.
Wake up, check Twitter and Facebook on the phone, eat breakfast, check train times online, travel to work reading from a screen, log on to a computer, work, go home, eat, put the TV on and check email, sleep. This has created a large public discussion about design changes that often just shifts things along, quite literally, by a few millimetres at a time.
"The public discourse about new UIs [user interfaces] at the moment is at the level of celebrity gossip," says John Underkoffler, chief scientist of Oblong Industries, who has advised on technology in films such as Minority Report and Iron Man.
"What they might add tomorrow morning is not really a big deal. Most of the debates happening now cannot be sorted out without history. We’ll be able to look back and find out what the truth is.