10 Best Computer Interfaces

Here is a list of best computer interfaces given at Technology Review.

• The Command Line
• The Mouse
• The Touchpad
• The Multitouch Screen
• Gesture Sensing
• Force Feedback
• Voice Recognition
• Augmented Reality
• Spatial Interfaces
• Brain-Computer Interfaces

Although it appears that Command Line is a history as far as ordinary users are concerned. However, it is the most popular and the best user interfaces with in programmers/developers community, and is not likely to be replaced.

The 41 years old technology, Mouse is perhaps the most used interfaces device along with the keyboard. However, touch screens are now replacing this. Already, a lot of mobile phones are available in the consumer marker with touch screen.

However, the future user interfaces will be based on Gesture recognition, Voice recognition and Augmented Reality (including Spatial). Thus, traditional Screen-Keyboard-Mouse interfaces will be replaced with Camera-Projector-Microphone-Motion Sensors interfaces. The MPAR will be a revolution in Human Computer Interaction, and is beginning to happen now.

Towards Natural Features Tracking

The fiducial markers for AR applications provide robust tracking capabilities. However, it is more desirable to use natural features in the scene to estimate 6 DoF pose of the camera. The Studierstube Team at Graz University of Technology have demonstrated robust Natural Feature Tracking (NFT) for known planar surfaces. They use modified versions (for hand held devices) of SIFT and FERNS to compute and match features in the scene.





More details can be found in the following paper:

Daniel Wagner, Gerhard Reitmayr, Alessandro Mulloni, Tom Drummond and Dieter Schmalstieg, "Pose Tracking from Natural Features on Mobile Phones", ISMAR 2008