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Remember 10 years ago when voice-recognition and Dragon Naturally Typing was going to replace the keyboard? Yea that didn’t quite pan out how we all thought…
I think at some point we were going to replace the mouse with eye-tracking lasers on the monitor and then some sort of brain-tie-in that would tell when you “clicked” something, but that never happened either.
Apparently analytist think it will happen this time… for double-realsies and it’s all the touch screens and “facial recognition” that will do it. They claim that the iPhone (touch screen) and Nintendo Wii (Wiimote) are opening the doors to alternative manipulation devices that will usurp the mouse. The analysis did concede that the keyboard wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon though.
This reminds me of the days when we all had CRTs and would freak out when someone would come over and smear their greasy hand down your monitor trying to point at something. Am I really going to be picking my hand up off the keyboad and shoving it into my monitor’s eye to work my way around a UI?
Am I going to take my hand off of my keyboard and pick up a Wiimote-esque pointer to “waggle” it at the monitor that is sitting a foot from my face to draw something or throw my IM window around the screen?
Probably not…
I think these new technologies open the doors to interesting applications inside specific pieces of software (like Google Maps with a touch screen or Photoshop with a Wiimote) but ever time I have ever seen a fundamentally new mechanism for controlling current computer systems they never catch on.
The only way I see this stuff replacing the mouse is if the way data is presented and interacted with is fundamentally changed… and if you are going to do that then, you will have new input systems because you have new systems; so not much of a surprise there.
In the mean time, I think the mouse and keyboard are going to be with us for another 15 years. 10 years for OS manufacturers to realize that we don’t have to keep using the Windows 3.1/Macintosh paradigms from the 80s and can actually do something different, then 5 years for it to catch on to any degree.
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July 21st, 2008 at 1:06 am
CRTs had 3 big problems:
-high power consumption
-Big and Heavy
-Radiation that could cause cancer from very extended use.
i still got 1 in my house on an old pc for visitors.
HAHA mouse and keyboard is the only thing that keeps PC gaming alive and makes it different from consoles.
they may not get replaced not for another “15 years”, but probably 30 or more years.
i still clearly see my 3 year kid using a mouse and keyboard at 17 or 18. In fact he loves it now
“if it’s not broken it will be damn hard to try to find something to fix”
i foresee some enhancements, nothing else.
July 21st, 2008 at 7:10 am
Manny, totally agree dude. That adage is so damn true, you can’t convince people to inconvenience themselves for no major foreseeable benefits. Like telling everyone typing DVORAK is faster/better for carpal-tunnel… it’s so damn inconvenient to relearn a typing style no one is going to learn it just because it’s marginally better.