Touch, biomechanical sensors, heads-up: human-machine interaction news

Interface moving beyond mouse, keyboard - SFGate:

Leap Motion supplied this photo for the SFGate article:
replacing the mouse with gesture control.

OK, "thinking out of the box" has become an incredibly trite, overused term to describe innovative approaches.

But new ways of interacting with machines--computers, displays, 3-D projections--mean there IS no box.  This short Bloomberg update published by the San Francisco Chronicle summarizes what's on the horizon.

I think the muscle-sensing Myo device from Thalmic labs  (video at right) is an especially interesting idea: worn on your forearm, it senses muscle motion down to precise finger movements, and translates it into ways to interact with displays or projected images.  I saw Microsoft labs demo an early version of this idea in 2010 at MIT's EmTech conference; as a for-instance, say you are wearing Google Glass, and want to enter text by typing, rather than voice (a PIN, or something personal.)  Glass could project a virtual keyboard into your field of vision, while the Myo device senses you typing on any surface with your fingers, translating it into a virtual image of your hand at the projected keyboard.

As technology gets better, it disappears.  Our behaviors of interacting with tech can become more transparent and more subtle.  This is an amazing area of rapid development in technology.