Neo-Paleofuturism : The Waving Arms Around Interface

So obviously the other thing that I find really irritating about Minority Report is the way that everyone else seems to love the Waving Arms About Interface (Waai) that they use at the police station.

I don’t want to wave my arms about. If you don’t have to stand, sit, if you don’t have to sit, go and have a nice lie down. My trackpad allows corner to corner movement of the mouse with the most minuscule of muscular movements of a single finger. It’s almost thought control. That’s what I want.

So anyway, here are some videos from the future… the first from the same people that brought you, IE6, Vista, The Blue Screen of Death and that fucking talking paperclip thing… a web 2.0 version of a spotless Gattica-like utopia. Nobody has fingerprints.<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&#038;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5&#038;showPlaylist=true&#038;from=shared" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage">Video: Future Vision Montage</a>

(from where there are more of them, once this one’s finished etc)

Everything’s a smart-surface. The whole world is one massive curvy-cornered flash interface.

The there’s this, which is tres charmant etc – and they do at least have the honesty to insert a blue-wall-of-death, albeit in the shape of a badly rendered building.

from

Which has a bloke designing a European Olde-Towne using a rather impressive Waai that someone commented looks a bit like Google’s Sketchup… pretty impressive if it can do that.

All of this was at least partly inspired by this 1993 predictive video from Sun Microsystems which also uses Waai s quite a lot.

Which as Joel Johnson points out, is a far more accurate prediction predictor than any sort of actual reality predictor.

1993 was a long time ago. I didn’t see my first email until 1994. Everyone was using Mosaic browsers… and unless I’m very much mistaken, Auckland University where I worked, used to download and locally cache the entire Internet. Something like that anyway.