I went up to the coffee machine and for a quick moment I was expecting dispenser to recognize me and serve me a coffee of my taste, I make daily for myself at my office kitchen. This happened right after I came back after watching Microsoft’s announcement of Natal at E3.
Natal, as you might be aware is a new xbox project announced by Microsoft, which would change the way players interact with their gaming system (xbox console). You dont need any controller to do whatever you have been using it to play on xbox.
This is a dawn of a Natural User Interaction (NUI).
All of this and other observation leads me to this conclusion:
As we become computers, computer becomes us (human).
We first trained ourself to to be able to interact with computer the way it understand, and now we are making computer to understand human. I believe this is a law of human machine interaction. I would call it Garg’s law of human machine interaction.
While Natal is a big step towards the realization of NUI, I believe its just a scratch on the surface of the possibilities. There are machines/equipments/tools all around us which decides its behaviour (or perform it function) taking external factors into consideration (say thermometer, barometer), but now machines would be capable of considering one more a very important factor i.e. human body.
Be it getting trained on salsa in front of your TV screen, lessons on table etiquette, or practicing or even conducting interviews via Natal enabled system, possibilities are endless.
Just try to imagine a human in a machine when you go near a machine next time and tell me what you thought it could do.
Till than game On!!
