Video: What does the future hold for smartphones?

Over the past 20 years, personal computing has become smaller, faster and cheaper. But what hasn’t changed is the user. Chris Harrison, Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, USA, and a participant at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2014, outlines the limitations of today’s consumer technologies and how scientists are rethinking the way we interact with personal devices.

Here are some quotes from the clip. You can watch the full video at the top of this page:

On the power of today’s personal devices:

What’s really interesting is that if you took this device (the iPhone 5s) back in time with you 20 years, it would actually be the third-fastest computer on the planet.

On what companies are doing to increase the capability of devices:

They’re just making bigger and bigger devices. They think that the way to increase the capability of these devices is to increase the size. And this is a very dystopian future, in my mind – we’re all going to be walking around with gigantic phones. And what you’ll find, if you talk to consumers, is no one’s saying ‘I want a gigantic phone.’ You’ll never hear people say this. What you’ll hear them say is, ‘I want a better phone. I want to do more sophisticated things on that phone.’

On the direction of research:

What we’ve found in the last few years is that, increasingly, where industry is focused on size and capability being linked, what we’re trying to do in the research community is to decouple those two. We’re saying we want to increase the capability of devices, but not by simply making the size bigger. Is there something cleverer that we can do to increase capability and keep them small, or maybe even make them smaller? It’s a big challenge because it’s not obvious, and so I call it a grand challenge.

On the limitations of current interfaces:

When you look at the touch experience it’s very numerically centric. It’s one-finger poke, two-finger pinch, three-finger swipe, four-finger swipe. The number of fingers defines what the mode of the operation is. But what’s interesting is that when you look at how you go around the world, the number of fingers you use isn’t the important thing. I don’t two-finger get dressed in the morning and three-finger drink my coffee and five-finger handshake you. We just do these tasks all the time and it’s not the number of fingers. It’s not a human-centred dimension for design.

All the amazing things we do with our fingers and hands, like grasping and knocking and rubbing, we’ve devolved into pointing and poking our little tiny fingers at a screen, which I think is a very simplistic view of how we think about our hands.

On innovations in device interaction:

We need to think about how we can bring the power of human hands and digital tools into the 21st century.

The thing that makes us really powerful in the real world is the fact that we can change the grasp of our hands. And if we think about grasp and look at the variety of tools that we use, it’s very expressive. So, how I hold a brush or scissors or binoculars or an umbrella, the pose is really, really different. And we can actually start to think about leveraging that in interactive experiences.

What’s really important to recognize today is that we can make all computers small. We can make, in the very near future, $50 devices that we can sprinkle around our world; but we don’t necessarily want to have tablets all around our world. We want to have small computing. The promise of computing, the vision for 60 years, has always been that we can have these devices sprinkled around our environment. But because they are small today we think that they have to be unusable and that really is limiting the promise of mobile and wearable computing, and ubiquitous computing, where we can have devices flourish in our environment.

Author: Chris Harrison, Assistant Professor, Human Computer Interaction, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Image: A visitor holds a new Smartphone next to another device at the Unpacked 2014 Episode 2 event ahead of the IFA Electronics show in Berlin, September 3, 2014. REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke