i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Even a legendary visionary like Vannevar Bush might have been taken aback had he visited the VMworld conference held last week.
 Three ideas that will enable the seamless flow of information, that integrate humans with the world of digital data. There are no definite boundaries anymore. Are we becoming like human  computers , or are they becoming computer humans!

• Playing on this theme Pranav Mistry candidly stated, "We as humans are not interested in computers. Our interest is in information”, as he presented his now highly publicized and celebrated Sixth Sense.  The device, using our natural hand gestures, allows us to interact with the physical information around us, as well as the digital. Is this what the 21st century Memex would look like?
• A Brain Computer Interface technology at Emotiv Systems allows users to access the digital world, just by thinking! Using a headset which picks up impulses from the human brain, the user can control his digital environment. 
•  LuminAR, which resembles a light bulb, but has the capability of projecting Internet(instead of light) on any surface. Allowing users to access internet at any point, assuming there is no electricity problem, a device like this could find various applications for its ease of use even in an age of iPhones and iPads.

Human Computer Interaction, or Human Information Interaction(?) will probably never be the same again.

 Related reading:  http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/
                             http://www.emotiv.com
                             http://fluid.media.mit.edu/people/natan/current/luminar.html