The Future

Microsoft has a vision for what the future of technology will be like in the year 2019, only ten years from now. They envision that the trend of touch interfaces will continue to grow and create a more natural user interface for all forms of information. They also envision that a lot of things will be made out of glass.



The thing I like most about their vision is the level of interactivity between various devices. The ability to drag data from one device seamlessly to another would be very natural and easy to use if it worked as smoothly as it does in their promotional video. It is also not too big of a leap from the current general concept of draging files from one folder or location to another on a computer. This could make the transition into such an interactive world more smooth.

However, I don't know how well the prodigious use of glass will actually work out. While it looks very cool, if there is a graph or chart in an important business meeting that is displayed on the window, having skyscrapers in the background could prove to be more than a little distracting.

Also, there are some instances where the extra technology seems like overkill and would be too expensive to implement. Specifically, having a digital boarding pass for each passenger who is travelling on a given day would be radically more expensive than the traditional paper boarding passes. That said, the ability to look up flight information in real time from your boardinng pass would be pretty useful when travelling through the airport.

While I don't know if this technology will be this pervasive in 2019, I think having a vision as bold as this one is important for the advancement of user interfaces. Microsoft is already trying to improve the connectivity and interactivity between computers, TVs, and cell phones, so it is only a matter of time before they try to make everything as interactive as it is in this video.