The other day Bill Gates gave a speech to Stanford engineering students in which he talked about Tablet PCs, touch, and other devices “natural interfaces.”
From his speech, which you can read online at the link above:
“You’re starting to see the beginnings of a change to a broad range of interaction techniques I call natural user interface. You see it in the 3D controller that the Wii has. You see it in the touch that the iPhone has. You see it in products like Microsoft Surface where we have cameras that can look at any gesture, any object that’s appearing, and seeing what you’re doing. You see it in RoundTable that sees who’s in the room and decides who’s speaking by taking these multiple camera feeds….We now have the power to perform natural user interface.
A form factor that I’m a big believer in, that I’m excited to make sure we keep investing in, to drive it so it’s attractive to the mainstream, is the tablet device. This is where you can read off the screen, that it’s light, cheap, long battery life; eventually a replacement for paper-based textbooks.
My daughter goes to a school where they use that Tablet PC, and they use the pen, and they’re very adept at it, and it’s amazing to see how they kind of learn in a different way, because they have that tool.
There’s still a lot of work to be done to get that down to the say several hundred dollars and the lightness and battery life that we need, but that is absolutely coming. It’s a fundamental tool that will change the consumption of learning material, and even in the office place will be the device that you have as you go off to meetings.”
Yes, Bill Gates is keeping up the vision of lower cost Tablets–especially for education. I hope there are some exciting things to come in the new future. With Intel’s next-gen, low-power processors we might begin to see all-day Tablets designed for education come to the forefront.
I was also glad to hear Bill Gates talk about touch surfaces as more than just the Surface computer:
“We now talk not just about computers on the desk but computers in the desk, because we can recognize what you’re putting there, and let you touch and expand things. Your desk will just be a horizontal surface display, your whiteboard will just be a vertical surface display. So, the ability there to take business information or project schedules and touch and manipulate and see those things, and then have a portion of it that’s a videoconference with another person where you’re working together and interacting, that will just be commonplace. When that’s cheap, people will go to that, and we need a whole new generation of software that can interact and use those things.”
He’s exactly right. Although I’d quibble with him a bit on some of this technology. There are already touch capable surfaces on the market that more and more schools and businesses are using, yet “touch” as a technology concept hasn’t been brought together into one cohesive model in Windows. I see this as a glaring missing opportunity. Touch as implemented in Surface is great, but there are many touch concepts that are almost identical in touch displays too. They need to all be brought together at the software level. You can tell it’s not there yet because all of the hardware companies are doing their own thing. This doesn’t help the software community. For these technologies to really catch on it’s not going to just be about cost, the software has to become more accessible and plentiful too.