I admit it. I can't keep up.
That's why I've been watching Dr. Andrea Gaggiolo's Positive Technology Journal blog ever since before I started FutureHIT. His brief post yesterday on tangible query interfaces is an example of the sort of find he comes up with many times a week. Such interfaces are inevitable, and I can't wait for them to arrive. It won't be long - they're already working in the laboratory.
The movie Minority Report was like a catalog of nascent technologies when it was released; some have come to pass, like Web sites that notice where you are in the Real World and tailor content accordingly. Others are still in the works, like the tangible database interface Tom Cruise uses to locate where a murder is about to take place in the very near future. Peter Schwartz of the Global Business Network, one of the gods of the scenario planning world in which I am a mere mortal with few experience points, was the future technology adviser, an excellent (one might say prescient) choice.
The movie was set in 2054, and we may need to wait that long for magnetic-powered bubble cars that crawl up the sides of buildings, but the first tangible database interfaces are already here. They're not yet like the ones depicted in Minority Report, but time does fly when we're having fun...
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