Touch is slick and easy but it’s not for everything. And it’s already going out of style. The new kid in town is a natural user interface, Post-Touch – an interface that goes past the requirement of touch and can detect gesture usually through a near-field depth camera.
As it turns out, “revealing where one lives and works at the granularity of census blocks is uniquely identifying for a majority of the U.S. working population.” Anonymous location data really isn’t.
New cellphones are showing up with NFC readers embedded in them, which not only flips the technology around, it allows two-way communication. Now, you can request and use the information instead of the other way around.
As more and more “things”, such as sensor-based electronics get connected, they become content providers and consumers – creating, requesting and providing data to each other, making up an “Internet of Things.”
The difficulty, of printing an actual phone is, of course, printing the electronics that go in the phone. The current hurdle is designing an ink that not only conducts electricity, but does so in a controlled manner. Xerox and Optomec have some cool solutions.
Smartphones are so much more than the average computer, and the magic lies in the sensors. Unlike traditional computers, smartphone can sense location, position and acceleration and so much more. This is a huge, technological leap forward that enables many applications that were not possible before.
