The new Nokia future vision video is out on YouTube of course, and shows some interesting aspects of future interaction with digital. Digitally-enabled glasses cant be that far away (though I hope they will look better than those in the video).
However there are two aspects that seem to me to be out of place in any vision of the medium-term future. Firstly, it is the phone itself. Surely, this will evolve from being the remarkably current-looking phone in the video, complete with QWERTY keypad. And secondly, it is the complete lack of innovation in using voice as a means of control, and still relying on the phone keyboard, or manually selecing emoticons. Voice to text, and conversely text to voice is already pretty advanced. Anyone trying out the AT&T Labs demo will realise that the unintelligible robotic voices are a thing of the past already, and Google Voice can transcribe quickly and easily from voice into text.
Surely, language is the most natural interface we have with our external environment. Being able to interact with the digital world simply using your voice will surely be a key indicatori of the progress we are making towards a more natural interaction with the digital world and beyond, back to reality again.
