Future of HCI

Extended reality

Extended reality (XR) is an umbrella technology that covers all three types of realities: AR, VR, and MR. One goal behind this reality is to give users a common stage to experience all realities. This reality is the future of interaction. Tesla’s master reality suit has been a huge success in this field.

• Teslasuit: This suit integrates the ability of haptic feedback, where the users receive body sensations and physical exertions as they would in real life, and motion capture, where the user’s actions and movements are captured to track improvement and provide baselines. A third ability of the suit is biometric sensors. These sensors record heart rate, stress level, etc.

Brain-computer interaction

Brain-computer interaction (BCI) is the technology to access brain activities, thoughts, dreams, and knowledge and transform them into actual outputs. Are we saying interaction with no physical activity and just thoughts? Well, yes! This would open a whole new world of possibilities.

A lot of experiments with proven results have been done on monkeys and rats. Chips are being used to store, transfer, and connect. Developments include the following wonders:

• A monkey with a broken spinal cord was able to control its lower body using chips. A chip was inserted in its head and the other in its lower body.
• A monkey controlled an electric wheelchair by the chip inserted in its brain.
• A rat with a chip inserted in its brain was taught how to do some tasks to get food. Once it learned, the chip was connected to another mouse’s chip in some other part of the world. The two brains got connected and the second mouse immediately knew what to do to get food. Does this mean knowledge transfer from one brain to another? Yes!

Point to ponder: Will technology make us superhuman? Think about it. If you are connected to a person through a chip, you two will be able to communicate through thoughts, share memories and experiences, and share knowledge. Now think, if we get connected to the internet, we will be able to access any piece of information. But, all our personal information, our thoughts, memories, our life, everything will also become open-source for anyone to access. Weird!

The road ahead

Now that you have learned how to design the most usable interface for systems, a wide range of further paths is open to you. This course has provided you the basis you will need to design interfaces for devices like mobile applications, websites, web apps, etc. The next phase is to learn frontend technologies like JavaScript, React, Flutter, etc.

If you get around to designing interfaces and use concepts you have studied in this course, do let us know how your experience went. You are welcome to share any feedback you have on this course.