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Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

the problem with revolutionary user interfaces is that nobody knows how to use them. when you see a "picture under glass" of a piano keyboard, you know that in order to make noise you tap the keys. if your interface is a minor incremental change from the status quo, it doesn't require education.

this vision of the future isn't just cool, it's relatable. anybody can look at the products displayed there and think "hey, i know how to use that". if you dream up some amazing new tactile user experience, it might be revolutionary but will people understand it?

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I'm not sure that the benefit of making things intuitive or easy to learn is worth the cost of limiting the technology.

Calculus is less intuitive, harder to learn than arithmetic, but it's much more powerful.

Can't we reboot our interfaces, start with a large but consistent vocabulary, and remove limits instead of imposing more of them upon the altar of immediate and complete understanding?

http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/9325300749/a-different-kind-o...

Not only that, but you might not be able to see the interfaces of the future. A couple that come to mind:

mind reading interfaces (ECG Headsets)

camera based (like the kinect)

fabric sensors

Not to mention the leaps that machine learning will bring. As we have more and more semantic interfaces with technology things that seem magical now will soon be routine.

What this article does inspire for me is the need for better 3D prototyping with home 3D printers and CNC machines. These are the tools you need to come up with better touch interfaces, not yet another SDK. I think we will see more and more of those as well, so here's hoping for a brighter future for interaction design!

It'd also be fairly hard to convey haptic interaction.

More fundamentally, it seems to me like there's no point in showing us something, even if it's achievable, if we have no frame of reference for understanding it, or believing that it's possible. 'Visions' aren't really visions if we can't imagine it happening. Seeing Avatar didn't make me go "wow...one day", seeing this video does.

We can learn what we don't understand. To use a current example, in modern user interfaces there are two types of metaphors: the ones you can deduce by looking at them (a push button affords to be pushed) and the ones you learn (clicking underlined words was not obvious not so long ago).

If it is done well, they should understand it better.

Think of a progression from the most abstract interface ("C:\>") to the most concrete (hold hammer, hit things). It's implicit in the article that future visions should be moving further along that progression.

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