Have you ever had a feeling like your cell phone is vibrating in your pocket but you know darned well that it’s across the room? Or maybe you start thinking about a console or PC game which you recently played and notice your hands tensing up in the same way they did when you had to perform a drastic move in the game, again with obviously no controller in your hand. It is a rather interesting phenomenon.
When it comes to computers, we normally use a mouse and keyboard to let it know what we want from it. The above described stimulations from our mind are from precicely the same concept! In order to move our bodies, we must tell different parts of our bodies what to do. Sounds obvious, right?
As a culture, we have decided that the method for interfacing with devices in our lives will be through the movement of our bodies. Pushing a button is caused by us telling our finger to apply pressure to a surface; moving a mouse is caused by us talling our arm and wrist to move around while our fingers grip the mouse. It may sound obvious to you, but we do have many methods by which we could interface with devices. Our culture has simply not pursued those methods aggressively enough to make them work. Why? Because the method we have chosen works just fine. Thus is the nature of money. We won’t invest in something which provide immediate results up and over what we currently have. Research and Development is a touch subject and rarely gets the attention deserved in most cases.
A few of the other methods we could use (no matter how far-fetched they might sound):
Voice Control
This is obviously stating a command while a computer receives, interprets and acts upon it. There are as many uses for this input method as there are for the normal keypad entry method.
Mind Control
This is, by far, the most far-fetched of the methods presented, but my goal of this article is to present possible interfacing methods despite the time period in which they might exist, not to convice you that they are possible.
This really isn’t that different from what we are currently doing. The obvious problems are that we don’t have the technology to allow this type of interfacing nor are we aware of any negative side-effects. Some fear that since the only thing our minds
Visual Control
A little confusing, but pretty flipping ingenious! An example of this is a small application called Dasher which is used to enter text more effiently than a stylus (in some people’s opinions) on hand held devices. Check it out. The awesome part of this is that when the eye-tracking part of this software is implemented, one’s eye can move to the next desired letter in the array of possible letter and that letter will become larger and eventually (within less than a second) will be selected as the next character entered.
No Input
“What, huh?! Okay, I was following you up to that point.” Right, me too. ;p Kevin Warwick, the professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading, England. I’ve followed some of his work for a while now and I must say that it looks pretty interesting. As much as I cringe as the thought of having any sort of implant, he had one which triggered doors and lights as he came near. That is pretty danged neat!! Also, a television that comes on when you sit on a couch. There are probably more ways to implement this method than any of the others!
Once the world is able to move past the stigma that is the mouse and keyboard that we use now, we will be able to move into some pretty interesting interfacing methods, even more that we have not heard or thought of yet!
