In the past few decades, everything about our computers have changed. The screens. The guts. The size, weight, and materials. The software itself, of course. But one thing has stayed exactly the same, frozen in time from the early days: The tools we use to tell them what to do. So it’s odd that we’re so desperate to throw them out the window.Early on, there were two competing ways for us to talk to our computers. The command line and the graphical user interface, or the system that gave us a screen that looked like a desktop and files that looked like little file folders, which we could navigate through using the keyboard and mouse. The latter won out, and since then, they’ve reigned as the primary way to communicate with a PC.But over the past five years, usurpers have arrived, first in the form of touch screens, then in the form of gestural interaction systems like Leap Motion. Yesterday, HP introduced us to Sprout, a computer that consists of a touchscreen monitor, a RealSense 3D camera, a projector, and a flat touchscreen mat to create the ultimate Frankenstein of interaction methods. It also, like so many of its peers, kills the keyboard and mouse for good. Kind of. continue reading >
