Reach Out and Touch…

Technology you want to touch

Bill Gates isn’t given enough credit as a visionary. The mega geek has a surprisingly good record of successfully predicting technology innovations years in advance- no mean feat in such a fast-changing industry.

For example, as far back as 2001, billionaire Bill was predicting the dominance of tablet PCs, i.e. slate-like computers. He was much derided for his fixation over the years, but now he’s being vindicated.

The tech world is feverishly anticipating the coming of a tablet computer from Apple with the breathless fervour of Evangelicals awaiting the Rapture. Tablet computers are set to go mainstream.

But so what? The interesting underlying trend is what Mr Gates described as ‘natural interface’ computing. The idea is, computers will evolve so that we can relate with them in more natural ways that bypass the sterile mouse and keyboard.

Just as children enjoy finger-painting because our hands are our tactile connection to the physical world, we presumably want to touch our computers. Nothing proves this theory like the success of the iPhone and the current proliferation of similar touch-screen gadgets.

From this, we can extrapolate that the next wave of computing devices after the touch screen generation will be voice-activated. We will want to talk to our devices as well as touch them. Will they talk back?