Let's start our journey by briefly peering into the past, specifically at how our interaction with computers has changed over time and how it might be in the near future.
Early computers, bypassing when people were used as computers, were large mechanical machines, and their size and cost meant that they were fixed to a single location and limited to a specific task. The limitation of a single function was soon resolved with Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC), one of the world's first general-purpose electronic computers. Due to its size and cost, it was still fixed to a single location and interacted with/programmed through a complex process of rearranging physical switches on a switch board. Mainframes followed and introduced a new form of interaction, the Command Line Interface (CLI). The user would interact with the computer by issuing a series of instructions and have the response returned to them via a Terminal screen. Once again, these computers were expensive, large, and complex to use.
The following screenshot is an example of DOS, an operating system that dominated the personal computing market in the late 1980s:
The era of direct manipulation interfaces and personal computing followed. With the reduced size, cost, and introduction of the Graphical User Interface (GUI), computers had finally become more accessible to the ordinary person. During this era, the internet was born, computers became platforms allowing people to connect and collaborate with one another, to be entertained, and to augment their skills by making data and information more accessible. However, these computers were, despite their name, still far from being personal, neglecting the user and their current context. These computers forced the user to work in a digital representation of their world, fixing them to a single location--the desk.
The following photograph shows the Apple Macintosh, seen as one of the innovators of the GUIs:
BlackBerry Limited (then known as Research In Motion), released its first smartphone in around 2000, which edged us toward the mobile computer. The tipping point was in 2007, when Steve Jobs revealed the iPhone. Smartphones became ubiquitous; personal computing had finally arrived, and it was a platform that was inherently personal. Constraints of technology provided the catalyst to rethink what the role of the application was. Since then, we have been incrementally improving on this paradigm with more capable devices and smarter services. For a lot of us, our smartphone is our primary device-being always-on and always-connected has given us superpowers our ancestors had only dreamed about.
The following is a photograph showing the late Steve Jobs presenting the first version of the iPhone to the world:
Taking a bird's-eye view, we can see the general (and obvious) trend of the following things:
- Minimization of hardware
- Increase in utility
- Moving toward more natural ways of interacting
- The shift from us being in the computer world toward computers being in our world
So, what does the next paradigm look like? I believe that HoloLens gives us a glimpse into what computers will look like in the near future, and even in its infancy, I believe that it provides us with a platform to start exploring and defining what the future will look like. Let's continue by clarifying the differences and similarities of virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and MR.
The following is a photograph illustrating an example of how MR seamlessly blends holograms into the real world:
