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In Spielberg's future, you only have to twirl your fingers at a computer screen to make it do what you want. It looks cool enough, but it's time for us to let it go: we’ve built our graphics and our electronics around interface eye candy, rather than trying to come up with new and more effective ways to control our real and imaginary gadgets. The best thing you can say about touchscreens are they look good on camera and they’re better than T9 texting, which is kind of like being better than fax machines. A lot of hand waving. Very little point-and-click.
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I disagree. The thing that's impressive about movies like Minority Report is not the eye candy or the weird hand-waving, it's the instantaneous response and precision of the user interface. There is no "oh crap, I meant squigle not squagle", or "dum-dee-dee-dum, I'm waiting for 100Gbytes of jpegs to load". I think the author of that article completely misses that point.
Marc
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All those nice glowing panels on the bridge. bleugh!!!
A holodeck now that would be nice.
Q. Hey man! have you sorted out the finite soup machine?
A. Why yes, it's celery or tomato.
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Marc Clifton wrote: it's the instantaneous response and precision of the user interface
Our computers might be fast enough for that if they were hooked to some precogs.
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Personally, I think the Star Trek TNG interface is still the best.
Not so much the strange panels, but the voice command.
The computer doesn't have a personality like the AI's in most sci-fi movies; because that would be inefficient. But it is just there whenever they need it and it just does what is has to do.
Instead of waving your arms around like an idiot, you simply need this:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=tallest+mountains+in+the+vincinity+of+K2[^]
Except even better.
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I'd prefer the Andromeda AI, especially if it came with the avatar, Rommie.
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