Envisioning Next Generation Applications & User Interfaces

Irving Wladawsky-Berger writes,"One of the most exciting areas of innovation is emerging around 3rd Generation User Interfaces or 3G/UI. 3G/UI, inspired by game players, promises to bring highly visual, interactive interfaces to all sorts of applications in health care, education, science and business". With a new paradigm emerging in the way people interact with computers, all kinds of new applications begin to appear, qualitatively better and different from anything before. Innovation in user interfaces soon gives rise to innovation in the programming and computing models needed to develop and run the new round of applications that they enable.
Microsoft and Sony are expected to come out with new game consoles, the new Xbox and PlayStation 3 respectively, that promise an order-of-magnitude improvement in performance for highly visual, interactive applications, especially when coupled with the much sharper images and sound of HDTV and surround sound.Efforts are already underway to adapt the underlying capabilities of the Xbox and PS3 for non-game applications.The continuing performance and price advances in computer technologies - not just micros, but memory, storage, bandwidth and everything else - makes supporting these new kinds of visual applications increasingly affordable, much as advances in PC capabilities helped graphical interfaces take off more than ten years ago. Finally, as computing becomes ubiquitous and integrated into just about everything around us, there will be huge market pressure to make interacting with those devices as easy and natural as possible. While these advancing technologies are the enablers of the move to 3G/UI, the real innovation will come from the many thousands of application developers - and, increasingly, users themselves, from gamers, to medical technicians (and patients), to educators (and students) - who will compete in re-thinking how to best integrate these new kinds of visual interfaces into existing applications, as well as come up with whole new kinds of applications that cannot be even envisioned today.